Like I Killed The Giants
by Falaphesian
Summary: Because love is really just two people trying to mash and force and crush themselves back together into the perfect, whole being they may once have been, back in an age when they were giants.  RikuSora, KairiNaminé, RoxasOlette.
1. Of the Sun, Part One

I completely disclaim almost everything right now. The 'origin of love' myth stems from Plato's Symposium and Aristophanes' speech on love within it. The song from which the title is derived from is _Origin of Love_, from Hedwig and the Angry Inch (which, in turn, is again based on Aristophanes' words). Finally, the characters are those of Square Enix's Kingdom Hearts. I have, basically, no rights to any of this. Except the plot. The plot is mine. Oh yes. _The plot is mine._

Enjoy. I love you.

(x) (x) (x)

_Perfection is perfectly impossible._

(x) (x) (x)

**Like I Killed The Giants**

Of The Sun, Part One.

Riku is currently positioned to be the next big man of power for his generation.

Having undergone a good many years of rigorous education, during which he diligently perused his collection of comic books front to back and back to front again while single-handedly mastering the thought processes of classic literature and delivering ground-breaking work to his ever-watchful professors—Riku is entirely ready to conquer a great many things, least of which is the world. It is spread before him, like so many blue and green picnic blankets and such, and all he has to do is settle in and enjoy. All he has to do is _sit_ and _take it_. And yet at this particular moment in time, he is finding the sitting and taking part of it all to be more than he bargained for when he became a prodigy.

Yes indeed, it is at this _particular_ moment in time that he is sitting in his new, angular office, carefully studying the potted plant located exactly thirteen feet, nine and three-quarters inches away from his oversized, over-polished desk. He was placed in this room maybe three, maybe four hours ago—it's all bit of a blur by this point—and he was told that his task for today is to study this plant.

This plant, Riku realizes, is like every other goddamn plant he's ever sat across from in his entire life. The more he thinks about it, the more he realizes that he has, in fact, sat across from a great many more plants in his lifetime than most people really, logically should. There is nothing _special_ about this plant. It might even be fake; Riku is caught up in that thought—_Is it even real?—_for he's not all that sure if getting up from his desk and walking over to poke at the plant is entirely within the job description. Maybe by getting up and poking at the plant, he will be defiling some unknown rule about plant-touching versus plant-observing. Riku doesn't know. And it _kills_ him that he doesn't know.

Pause this.

You and I both know that no one—no matter how _talentless_ an individual in an utterly _talentless_ world—is **paid** to watch plants. Especially possibly-fake ones. No. Really now. What Riku is doing is this:

He is waiting with the utmost diligence for his superior to arrive and tell him exactly what it is he's _really_ supposed to be doing. The only problem is that he's been waiting for the past three hours and he's developing muscle spasms in his left ankle and his neck is beginning to cramp up on the right side. He doesn't know how long he's supposed to spend in this office that has absolutely nothing in it except for the Untouchable Plant and, quite frankly, he feels rather pathetic for being driven so close to boredom-induced insanity on his first day in his new position.

He is twenty and his life is new and hopeful and good and he will do Great Things, according to many.

Yet no matter how great his life and no matter how hopeful his future, he can't really seem to get around to doing the Great Things if he's not given them to do. And really, he can't be _given_ the Great Things to do unless his superior comes in and gives them to him—holds out his hands and says, "These, Riku, are a precious few Great Things I've handpicked for you to do today. Enjoy! Let me know when you're done! But before you come see me to tell me, pick me up a vente caramel macchiato! Good luck, now!"

No, there is no caffeine-crazed superior to order him around and Riku is beginning to realize that the real world is nothing like what his education prepared him for. Mostly, this is because the real world is full of incompetent assholes, apparently, and no matter how lowly Riku may ever have thought of any of his instructors, he at least always held them in some respect for existing and breathing and taking up physical space.

Riku is done philosophizing about the plant. He's moved on to his superior. _Maybe I don't have one_, he began to think_. Wouldn't that be strange. Maybe my superior isn't real. Wouldn't that be stranger. …Maybe. …Maybe my superior is the __**plant**__. …Wouldn't…. that be _still_ stranger._

It is quarter past three when Riku wakes up from sleeping face-down on his desk. Having not been disturbed, he's decided he's had enough. He considers bidding farewell to the plant, then thinks twice of it, curses, and turns off the lights on his way out the door. One thoroughly unremarkable day down—lord only know how many to go.

As Riku turns to leave, he nearly yelps as a voice picks up right behind him. "Hey," a man says. He's ridiculously built and towers over Riku like a linebacker who could take him down by breathing. Considering the fact that Riku usually prides himself on his fitness, this is probably saying something. The man speak again and Riku tries to regain some sort of dignity, all the while praying to whatever god there is that this is not his superior witnessing him skipping out of work early.

The man asks, "Are you leaving?"

Riku waits for a few seconds, taking a wild, lucky guess that this man isn't, in fact, his superior at all. He's a co-worker—he must be—and if Riku knows anything about human companionship, he's also a friend in need of being made to climb the supposed corporate/political ladder. Shrugging one shoulder, Riku plays it cools—says, "My superior didn't show… I have nothing to do, is all."

The man nods and returns the shrug. Internally, Riku congratulates himself for knowing at least _something_ about a system completely new and alien to him. The man just says, "Fine, kid. Who cares, right? Just one thing."

"…What?"

"Leave the lights on."

"…_Why_?"

The man's smile is some sort of mix between amused and cocky as he says, "Janitors turn 'em off after they clean up. They'll take care of it." He nods. "You turn the light off, they know you're gone. You catchin' my drift?"

"…Yeah," Riku says. "I got it."

"Great." One thick, meaty hand claps down on Riku's shoulder and he nearly buckles under the weight of the thing. "Leave the lights on, chief." And with that, the man is gone, though if asked later where the man went, Riku probably wouldn't be able to answer. All Riku is aware of is the need to definitely, definitely befriend the big man in whatever way possible. Or at least—if not befriend—at least not make an enemy of him. One of those hands probably had the power to crush Riku's skull like a hollow chocolate bonbon.

Bonbons aside, Riku suddenly had a sick feeling in the pit of his stomach. He turned the lights back on in his office, cast one final, empty look at the plant by the window, and closed the door once more.

The working world was a terrible place to exist.

Having missed lunch that day in waiting for his superior to show, Riku realizes his hunger as soon as he sets foot outside the office building. With nothing else to do and nowhere else of great appeal to go, Riku settles for a swing by the hotdog stand at the corner of the street, telling himself it's for convenience's sake. The tram stop, after all, is only six blocks in the opposite direction. It's for convenience's sake that he eat a disgusting unhealthy lunch and then burn off all those calories just getting to the tram.

With two hotdogs—both covered in catsup and pickle relish—Riku doesn't hesitate in the slightest when it comes to downing the first. The second he carries with him towards a small, ugly city park, wondering if it's really all that sane to make an effort at savoring something like a hotdog in the first place. He sits on a park bench, stares at the hotdog in hand, and instantly hates himself for eating such a load of crap—for putting _up_ with such a load of crap.

No one has any control over what makes them think the way they do, and Riku, in this moment, doesn't have any control over the fact that the mediocre hotdog he is eating strikes him in a way that no hotdog really should ever strike a person. He feels, on some abstract, metaphysical level, that the crap of hotdogs is only fitting for the crap of his life as it has come to be. Riku is unfit for real food. Hotdogs are unfit for real stomachs. There is, he is sure, a very good, logical, and symbolic tie between the two.

A woman sitting on the bench diagonal of his lets her dog off the leash and Riku half-heartedly wonders if the thing is dumb enough to run into the road and get itself mowed over. On one level, he hopes so—make the dog suffer for his terrible day—it'll amount to something. But on the other hand, he doubts very much that his stomach could put up with watching _that_ fiasco, so he instantly caps his thoughts and tries to keep his brain quiet. It's not an easy task, especially when the dog—some hairy terrier with a moronic boy dangling in front of its face—waddles over and yaps. …And yaps… and _yaps_. Were the old biddy not sitting right over there, Riku would probably punt the damn dog across the park. As is, he just blinks stupidly at the thing and then looks at his hotdog.

It doesn't take a man of Riku's intelligence to figure out what it is the dog wants.

A large daub of pickle relish is shifting on the surface of the hotdog, and Riku—for no apparent reason—finds himself gambling and betting in the most immature and unrealistic sense of things. In his head, he tells himself: _If that lump of relish hits the ground before the dog's next bark, my life is over and I should kill myself. If it hits the ground after the dog barks again, I'll quit my job and flee the county._

The first high pitched squeaks of the dog's coming bark begin to leave its throat just as the relish falls—landing perfectly in the open and barking mouth of the stupid dog.

Riku stares at the dog. The dog stares back and licks its chops, awaiting more pickle. Without a second thought, Riku drops the entire remaining hotdog to the ground and gets up to walk the six blocks to the tram stop without the slightest glance back at the dog attacking what was once going to be his rebellious sort of a lunch.

x x x

About five minutes into the ride home, Riku actually starts to feel somewhat better about himself. Mostly, this is because he spies his reflection in the glass of the window across from him, and he's now thoroughly satisfied that he looks professional, handsome, clean-cut, and of some mental prowess all in one. That, he believes, must count for something in this world of drabs and dullards shuffling from building to building. At least he can feel good about _something_.

And that good feeling is a pleasant candle flame burning within, up until the tramcar pauses to pick up a new set of passengers and some obnoxious someone-or-other makes their way on board and roughly plops his person down on the empty seat beside Riku. People come, people go. Riku tries to pretend he's still sitting alone, but it's _strange_ how the guy's elbow is touching his and Riku isn't all that sure _why_ it's so strange, but it _is_ and it's _bothering_ him.

Riku makes to cross his arms over his briefcase, but soon realizes that this is completely the wrong move to make. Now he's actually drawn the attention of the guy and apparently said guy is very much a talker. A talker of weird, weird things, to boot. He shifts slightly to accommodate for Riku, then does a classic double take, complete with jaw-dropping effect. He says, somewhat predictably: "No _way_, hey? It's _you_, man!"

"What?" Riku thinks that maybe he should scoot down, but as soon as he makes another motion to do so, the boy just moves closer.

"You're _you_!" he says. And then, as though suddenly realizing the makings of a truly devastating and unfortunate sort of event, the boy's mouth is warped, tugged back and down towards his ears and then, rather elastic-like, snapped back into a very small frown pinched in the center of his face. He gives Riku a long, steady look, and then says, "You don't remember me, huh?"

"…No." Riku shakes his head and makes to scoot away again. It's taking just about every ounce of willpower he has not to make some expression of disgust and flick the creep off.

But the boy is persistent, if not intelligent. Riku is making every semi-polite signal he can that _no, he doesn't feel like talking_, but still the boy has him wrangled into some sort of conversation. The way he keeps looking up like he's _just about_ to say something and then jerking his attention back down towards his hands is obnoxious, in Riku's opinion. But still, he can't seem to find it in himself to give the kid the telling-off he deserves. The kid finally manages the words, accompanied by their fair share of wild hand gestures that leave Riku feeling less secure and more at risk than he rightfully _should_ feel on any mode of public transportation.

The boy raves: "I can't _believe_ this! Here I came all the way over here to sit next to you because I thought it _was_ you, and it _is_ you, and you don't even remember me! But how're you doing, man? Really—how _are_ you, huh? God, it's been for-freaking-_ever_, you know?"

"I'm alright," Riku says—because, really, he _is_ alright, all things considered, and he can't really think of anything else to say that wouldn't be rude or explosive. For once, he feels too tired to engage in conflict.

"No kidding, huh?" the kid asks. And then one index finger flicks out from a fist—it whips up and down—he says, "Hey—nice threads, man."

"Thanks." _Though why you're talking to me, I'll never know._

"Where you getting off?"

"Soon." _As in, as __**soon**__ as I possibly can._

The kid grins again—his teeth are ridiculously white as he says, "You always were an anti-social son-of-gun, weren't you?"

Whether it's because the boy's teeth are whiter than his or whether it's because Riku has just had a rather bad day, he's been pushed to the limits of his politeness. He narrows his eyes and rubs his right temple like there's a pressure there that will undoubtedly lead to a headache if the guy keeps at it. And, not bothering to hide the annoyance in his voice, Riku says, "Look, I definitely don't know who you are. _Or_ why you seem to know me."

"Grade-school, man!" the kid says. He's gesturing to try and convey his disbelief again, and Riku honestly feels like beating him as he once more accuses, "You _seriously_ don't remember!"

"Who the hell _are_ you?" Riku snaps.

For a moment, the boy looks hurt, and for half a moment, Riku feels guilty. Then the moment passes and the boy bounces back, and the half a moment passes and Riku is just annoyed once more. "Tidus," the boy says. When that doesn't seem to register, he elaborates in the only way he knows how. "…Sora's friend."

It clicks.

Riku blinks. "_Oh_."

'Oh' indeed! And there the memories are, surfacing rapid-fire, like it's some sort of wild party event or wild drug-induced mayhem going on in Riku's long-term memory. He recalls a life before offices and plants and hotdog promises—one largely revolving around blacktop drama and games of rock-paper-scissors to determine who got the swing set first. In sixth grade, Riku had felt the same approaching-the-top-of-the-world feeling he feels now, but somehow it was better then—possibly more pure, possibly more grand. And amidst it all, amidst the pride and splendor and glory of being one of the elite elders of the elementary school, Riku had felt some small grain of compassion and care towards his many underlings. Two of which just happened to be Sora and Tidus—who is apparently sitting beside him right now.

Oddly enough, Riku can't really drudge up the same oddball affection he'd had for the guy in his youth. This could be because Tidus just came out of nowhere like he did—lightning fast and far too quick and jarring for Riku's likes—but neither here nor there, Riku now feels he has to express some kind of understanding or some kind of remorse, at the very least, for not recognizing the kid. He's not what he used to be, as far as Riku can tell, for the Tidus of his memory is a runt and a mousey brunette who cries over everything. This guy is built, handsome, and sporting a stylish bleached blonde cut that sets of his eyes and makes them glow like two blue headlights.

As though picking up on Riku's obligatory apology about to bubble out of his mouth, Tidus waves one hand like it's nothing. Instead he just grins boyishly—says, "Fifth _grade_, man. Good year. Baby-school year. _Hey_. Where'd you end up going to high school anyway, huh? Man, we always thought we'd bump into you again sometime—me 'n Sora, I mean. Was way too bad when we didn't."

"I didn't go to high school," Riku says.

And then, in understanding, Tidus' expression changes drastically. "No shit," he whispers. "D.R.S., man?"

"Yeah."

Tidus lets out a low whistle and leans back against the seat. "_Dang_," he says, as though the realization has caused him to do an about-face in life—a truly pivotal moment in a truly pivotal sense.

Riku feels the silence between them swelling like a bad balloon, and the fact that it's there and it's very, _very_ real makes him more uneasy than an empty office and possibly-fake plant ever could. With a brief and careless nod in Tidus' direction, Riku all but leaps from his seat at the next stop and moves as one with the crowd exiting the tram. If Tidus has a word of protest to his escape, it is lost in the noise and pulled into the fray as the tram door closes and the thing rolls away on down the line.

x x x

There is only one living presence in Riku's condo aside from Riku himself, and that is the presence of Dio, his oversized teddy-bear hamster who, at this point, he has owned for all of five days.

Five days ago, Riku had gone to the pet store, fully planning on buying a cat. A cat, he had decided, was what he needed to turn his life around. A cat would give him a sense of responsibility and wholeness—a sense of which he was completely lacking in life. Cats were not dogs. They didn't crave people on a social level. No, their need was more basic. Humans were, to housecats, providers of food, water, shelter, and little else of importance. It was the exact sort of need Riku wanted to provide for. Nothing in excess, nothing in shortage.

He had been in the shop for all of five minutes before finding the exact cat he wanted—a marmalade tabby with eyes large enough that they seemed to want to roll out of the thing's cynical, judgmental little head. The cat's gaze said, "_I hate you"_, but the cat's meow said, "_I need you_." And Riku needed _it_.

Yet when he'd gone and spoken with the shop owner and given her proper ID and credit information, she'd simply shaken her head no.

"Have you cleared it with your superior?"

"No, I haven't started work yet… I start next week," he'd told her.

"The D.R.S. has a policy…" she trailed off. At least she had _sounded_ sympathetic. "I'm sorry, I'm surprised they haven't told you yet. Just last month—you know how it is. Animal ownership restriction for D.R.S. employees." She had broken eye contact for a moment and appeared to be hunting around behind the counter for something—some guidebook, some rulebook, Riku assumed. Some D.R.S. publication, inches thick with rules and regulations. And then, shrugging and giving up, she'd said, "You can have a mouse, though. Or a hamster. Even a rat."

Riku had settled, then, for the fattest hamster the store had. So massive was the thing that it took up the entire surface of his palm when seated there, and occasionally its rear end would drop off the side—stub of a tail dangling helplessly in the air. The hamster was a creature of complete and total dependence. The only difference between the hamster and the cat was that the hamster was oblivious to that need it possessed. Riku could have left it to starve in his bedroom and the hamster never would have thought to blame him in its last moments on earth. Not like the cat. The cat would've been smart enough to blame.

Too bad for Riku, his decision to buy the fattest, largest hamster there was not entirely thought through. In fact, the _reason_ his hamster was so huge was because it was very, _very_ pregnant. Had he not already gone and named the damn thing, he would've returned it without a second thought. But, having decided to just bring the babies back to the shop and keep the mother after all was said and done, Riku felt slightly better about himself. At least he wasn't the abandoning sort.

And so every day when Riku comes home from whatever he's been doing, he sets his things on the kitchen table, hangs his coat on the back of his chair, and promptly creeps into his room, carefully easing open the door and peering in at his hamster. He has not disturbed her for the past few days, leaving her with all the water and food he figures a birthing hamster could possibly need. And it is today, as Riku sets down his briefcase and removes his sports coat, that Dio is delivering.

The delivery itself is not the sort of dramatic torture Riku expects to witness. Instead, it is a rather small-scale event—Riku poised and still outside Dio's glass tank as Dio herself stretches and contorts within—one, two, three, four, and then five little parts of herself ripping free and rolling into the bed of shavings spread out around her. The babies are pink and hairless—ugly little pulsing things that Riku can't help but pity in their helplessness. For a while they roll feebly around in the world they're so new to before Dio seems to become aware of herself, her surroundings, and her offspring once more. And with this awareness, Dio promptly opens her mouth and devours her children one by one by one.

Riku thinks he probably should have seen that one coming.

Unable to do much of anything, he watches as the fifth and final hamsterling is devoured whole. Not a sound or a struggle has been made throughout the process—it all happens with the same ease and silence with which the birth itself had happened. Again, Dio is swollen and bloated with her children, but not _nearly_ in the same sense that she'd been before.

The day, Riku decides, has been a complete and total waste of life. For a while, he wonders if he should kill Dio—punish her somehow for being such a terrible creature of terrible instinct. But watching her lie there, obviously in some sort of indigestion pain from just having eaten five children in one go of it, he decides to leave her. He turns off the light and sleeps on the couch that night. He cannot stand to be near the thing.

x x x

It doesn't take more than a few days for Riku to figure out that so long as his superior doesn't show up, he doesn't have to do anything but sit at his desk for a few hours each day and monitor the plant's state of non-progress across the room. He quickly becomes a lowly creature of habit and is consuming two relish and catsup coated hotdogs on a daily basis. Riku being Riku, he doesn't seem to gain a pound, but he can feel the questionable meat rolling around his gut day in and day out, and after each and every lunchtime splurge, he always regrets eating what he does. But that doesn't mean he can change it.

It's not until Thursday afternoon, sitting at his desk and thinking about his lunch, that Riku is introduced—however strangely—to the roof-boy of the other building. Like so many things in life, this event is a complete coincidence, though the thought of it doesn't occur to Riku until much later. As it is, he just happens to look up from admiring a very small dent on the right corner of his desk and he just happens to have his gaze drawn to and out the wall of windows across from him, honing in on this little speck of movement just on the edge of his field of vision.

As Riku looks up, he sees a boy's legs dangling off the roof of the building opposite of his. From the distance he's at, they might as well be two denim-clad toothpicks sticking it out strong in the wind. But as we already know, Riku is no man of ordinary ability or intelligence. At least, he knows legs when he sees legs, and for the first time ever, Riku rises from his desk and moves towards the window.

Below him is the city, gray and reeking of metal and oil. Above him is the sky, smog-riddled, yet still with a trace of blue to be found in it somewhere. And right there, in the in-between, is the toothpick kid on the roof of the offices across the street. He's leaning back, weight on his hands, feet in the air, head tilted and staring at the sky. And for half a moment Riku is torn between two actions. Placing his fingers on the glass where the boy's head is, or flinging open the window and telling the kid to stop being an idiot and go get a life for himself.

As some means of compromise, Riku stands and does nothing. He just observes the boy and he remains next to the plant, which—he can now tell—is very fake indeed.

A knock comes at the door, and before Riku can bolt back to his desk and appear occupied, the door is opened and its frame is filled with the bulk of a man who should not, probably, be called so bulky. He's not _bulky_ so much as he's _angular_, and his edges and corners somehow seem to stick out all strange and off-balance, and Riku can't shake the feeling that the man now in his doorway is the dictionary definition of ugliness sprung to life and willed to live. The man is old, bald, has misshapen ears and a pointed beard-sporting chin that appears to be capable of jabbing a hole in a body, if thrust forward with enough energy.

And the man does jut his menacing chin forward as he enters the room. He tells Riku simply, "There you are. I was wondering when you'd get here. You've got work to do."

With that, a second man appears in the doorway, moves over to Riku's desk and promptly sets ten thick notebooks down on the surface. A third man appears and does the same. A fourth man scuttles in, bringing up the rear and setting six more notebooks upon the twenty already there, and then all three of them exit in much the same way in which they came in. The angular man—Riku's superior it seems—gives Riku a once-over, and then, seemingly satisfied, turns to go. For a moment, Riku wants to say or do something to make the man stop. After all, he's been going to work for days now and dying of boredom with nothing to do and no purpose to fulfill whatsoever... But the man offers no explanation and he's gone before Riku can muster up whatever it takes to ask.

When Riku looks back towards the window, the boy is standing stable and steady on the roof and staring straight back, locking eyes with Riku. He watches as the boy places his hands on his hips, and for a brief moment he's thrown back to childhood and stories of Peter Pan, and in that _same_ brief moment, Riku's almost dazed enough to wager that the boy actually _is_ Peter Pan and _is_, right at that very moment, preparing to jump from the roof and come gliding to his office window with ease.

But nothing of the sort happens. However perfect and storybook-like it could be, it's not the case. The boy on the roof presses two fingers together, throwing Riku a mock salute and grinning as he does it, breeze whipping his hair around his face. He seems to laugh, or so Riku settles for thinking, before he turns and disappears, beyond the tilted viewpoint Riku has, further back towards the center of the building's structure. Once there, Riku assumes, he descends.

_Well_, Riku thinks. _That was… weird._

x x x

It has been four days since Riku has seen the roof-boy and he has actually deemed it necessary to turn his hundred-some-odd pound desk completely around so that he no longer faces the window. The window is just too distracting, especially with the presence of the boy now known to Riku and _especially_ with that fake plant sitting it front of it like it is. The racket of the move, surprisingly enough, causes no uproar within the office. Once the desk is in place, the building remains quiet and still as ever, the only noise being that of the custodial buckets and carts as they move back and forth towards the day's end. Already, Riku has started working overtime to handle the masses of notebooks he has to fill. He doesn't know when they're due by, hence his frantic efforts to get them over and done with.

It's eight o' clock and Riku has been in the office twelve hours. Secretly, he's hoping Dio starves to death.

It's eight o' two and Riku flips to the first page of his third notebook—the page his superior has already headed with a single question.

_Topic #3: How do you break down an unbreakable wall?_

x x x

Riku's employer, the D.R.S., is the Destati Regional Syndicate—an organization which stands in place of a government in the Destati island chain, floating as it is off the coast of . Forty-two years ago, the governmental structure of Destati fell to pieces, just as the prime minister then fell to the hands of a rather "questionable" car accident. The capital was seized by a group of radicals no one had ever heard of before, but in the chaos of a collapsed government, their words had power and persuasion, and as many people will now claim—all innocent eyes and clueless heads, the lot of them—"It seemed like a good idea at the time."

Yet the people of Destati are of a rather laid-back persuasion. Sure, the government might sometimes step on their toes, but they've come to understand that so long as they obey the rules and accept the policies, it's all rather easy to exist alongside the Syndicate with little to no attention drawn to yourself whatsoever. The only exception to this rule happens to be if you are, of course, a child of exceptional intelligence.

Riku was once a child of exceptional intelligence.

In his fifth year of grade school, he took a test and passed with a near-perfect score. Every single question on his multiple-choice test had been correct, and all but one of his five essay exams had received a perfect score. The only essay that had _not_ held the prompt: _How do you break down an unbreakable wall?_ To an eleven year old, the answer is simple: you don't. If the wall is unbreakable, the wall is unbreakable, and that is that. Riku said as much and his essay failed. However, he was still a brilliant kid, and the D.R.S. promptly scooped him up, somewhere along the transition line between grade and middle schools.

The very reason the D.R.S. has stayed in power is due to these exams. Those who show their intelligence are employed by the government, and for lack of a better plan, all serve their duty quite diligently, deposited as they are in a think tank of sorts. There, they write essays for the rest of their life. Mostly, the essays have questions of security—_If you were hired to destroy five of the most important buildings in the Destati region, which would you destroy? How would you go about destroying them? What materials can be easily obtained in secret to create explosives? Where would you hold a resistance movement? What means of protest would you use against the Syndicate to rally the most support against the government?_

All questions pertain to the security and protection of the Syndicate. All questions are handled by the region's brightest minds and broadest imaginations. All questions are answered thoroughly and completely.

All except, of course, the question of the wall.

No one can seem to grasp the concept of breaking the unbreakable. And yet that is precisely what Riku is soon about to do. He does not realize it yet, but within this notebook will be the turning point of his life. The only thing between Riku and that turning point now is a few chance events that lie in wait just around the corner, just down the hill, and of course, just across the street, at the top of the building, at the edge of the roof.

x x x

It is nine twenty-three and Riku has spent the past hour or so writing out a draft of his thoughts on scratch paper beside the Wall Notebook. The draft he has now is a complete and total piece of crap and, if asked, Riku would be the first to admit it. But he is no closer to understanding the unbreakable wall now than he was nine years ago, and no matter how he wracks his brain, he cannot seem to come up with any method for breaking the unbreakable. He sighs, places his pen on his desk, and cradles his head in his hands, eyes closing.

_What am I doing here?_

Suddenly there is a flash that doesn't fade, an explosive light that fills the room with screaming, whining energy and shoots off and around Riku's back, streaming towards the wall across from him and hitting it, splashing across it—his own outline an inky blackness against blinding, glaring white.

"**WHAT THE HELL**?!"

The exclamation comes out as a spluttered reaction. Riku's eyes shoot open, then shoot closed again as his eyes scream from the pain caused by the room and the light now gushing in through the window. With a curse and some peculiar noise that seems rather akin to a squawk, Riku tips over in his desk chair and falls to the floor in a heap, reams of paper and stacks of notebooks following alongside him. Scrambling across the floor and seeing spots and swirls at each and every blink, Riku makes his way beneath the window, where he curses still once more.

The light is a spotlight and it's aimed directly at his office from atop the building across the street.

In some attempted expression of anger, Riku leaps to his feet, yanks open his window and—eyes shut—sticks his head out into the night air. His hair is whipped around his face and he's just about had it—the freezing cold, the blinding light, the carnivorous hamster, the oppressive company, the slacker superior, the sketchy, silent rules of the workplace—and NOW, the spotlight on top of it all. From both hands come the middle fingers and Riku shouts, "_FUCK YOU_! What the _hell_ are you doing?!"

He's sure it's the goddamn roof-boy behind it all.

And then, just barely audible through the wind and city racket, come the words: "Come up here!"

Riku glares behind closed lids. "Are you fucking _nuts_?!"

"No!"

"Turn off your stupid light!"

The spotlight wavers and wiggles a moment and then swings wildly upwards in a dramatic arc, shooting off harmlessly into the sky. For a moment, all Riku can see in the absence of the bright light is complete and total blackness, coupled by the fading splotches behind his eyelids. Then comes the voice again.

"Okay! Now come!"

"NO! GO SCREW YOURSELF!" Riku closes the window with as much force as he can muster, but ultimately fails to leave the impact he'd wanted—the window gets stuck halfway down and it takes quite a bit of effort on Riku's part to un-stick it. Between the time it takes him to get the window closed and start back over towards his desk (and he's started muttering profanities under his breath again), the roof-boy has regained control of the spotlight and swings it back down yet again, beaming the thing straight into Riku's office once more. And—once more, _still_—Riku's pupils contract wildly and send him again into blindness, just in time to trip over the pile of notebooks and papers that had fallen from his desk earlier.

For the sake of all things censored, Riku's words will not be stated.

Drawing himself up once more, Riku kicks the notebooks violently, stubs his toe, snarls, grabs his coat, grabs his briefcase, and promptly storms out of the office, determined to beat the roof-boy into an unidentifiable pulp of a thing, and then possibly throw him off the roof. Down he goes, sixteen floors on an elevator and charging out of the lobby, though the revolving doors, through the traffic, through the night, across the street. Into the lobby, into the elevator, up to the highest level it goes and out into the hallway. Riku is breathless now—be it from anger or from fatigue, even he can't tell. Gripping his briefcase tight as he can, he walks up the short flight of stairs that takes him to the roof of the building.

And there the boy sits, waiting for him. The spotlight stretches off pointlessly into the sky.

"There you are," the boy says.

In Riku's mind, this is precisely what he does: he strides up to the boy, sets his briefcase calmly on the ground, and promptly leans forward, gets in the boy's face, grabs him by the shoulders and shakes him around—roughs him up—says, "Goddammit, what is wrong with you? I was working! Do you know what working is?! NO! Apparently all you do is sit on roofs and annoy the living daylights out of anyone who actually has a goddamn purpose in life! Why don't you go get one, moron? There's a brilliant idea for you! Jesus!"

In actuality, this is precisely what Riku _really_ does: absolutely nothing. It is as though, somewhere in some uncolored and unknown part of himself, some _thing_ has armed itself with a pin and promptly punctured the rampant, growing hate and disgust within Riku—causing a light pop followed by a steady, rapid deflate. So now he's got nothing—nothing to feel by and nothing to say. His mouth hangs open because his brain is a little delayed in processing thought and action, and for all that Riku's body is poised to take that very action he had intended on, his brain is leagues and leagues behind.

Man and boy stand across from one another and can't seem to think of anything to say. It is in this instant that Riku becomes aware of what exactly it is that can break the unbreakable wall. The knowledge doesn't hit him in a wave—doesn't hit him with any force whatsoever—but rather, is slowly and surely revealed to him as though the veil covering the thought has finally risen and been removed after all these years.

Riku closes his mouth and swallows thickly. He would recognize that face anywhere.

"Sora," he says, for he has remembered words and knows the secret of the wall.

The boy grins. "Yeah, you. It's about _time_ you showed up."

(x) (x) (x)

OKAY, I know it's wayyy out there and possibly boring or weird or dumb or unlike any of the usual fanfiction I write. If this is a bad thing, say so and I will stop writing this. If it's not… well, then… say that. Or something. I don't even know. I don't even _know_! Blah!


	2. Of the Sun, Part Two

Like I Killed The Giants 

'Of The Sun, Part Two.'

"Riku."

"Yeah?"

"Did I do something wrong?" Sora asks.

"No, Sora. You didn't do anything wrong." Riku says it because he doesn't have anything else to say, because aside from annoying him and shining ridiculously powerful beams of light in his face at strange hours of the night, Sora hasn't really done much of _anything_ at all to him since… since Riku has last seen him. A time Riku is currently struggling to remember, to call back to image in his mind. _When did I __**last**__ see him?_

They stare one another down like that for some while and Riku is well aware of how windy it is up on top of the building like they are. He's glad for his coat, but notices Sora doesn't have one. The boy has grown vertically and in all the ways normal boys _should_ grow from ages eleven to nineteen, but Sora still looks so very small. Unlike Tidus, he doesn't appear to have filled out quite as much, though he and Tidus share the same powerful stare and piercing blue eyes. What little fat he seems to have on him clings to the corners and edges—the hidden, discrete portions of his face, making him look like a slender child on stilts with an Adam's apple pasted to his neck. A part of Riku wants to melt at the sight and the notion, but it's a part of him he hasn't ventured near in years.

Young and alien, that part of him is clawing now to resurface, and Riku finds himself unable to say anything for fear that the words won't be his, but those of his twelve year old self, bubbling out high and giddy from his throat like a fit of giggles.

"So why did you disappear on me?" Sora asks him.

Fending off the inner child, Riku turns his gaze skywards, opposite the direction of the spotlight, and sighs. "Sora…" And aside from 'Sora', he doesn't really say anything, because on some level, he hopes the sigh, the avoidance, and the name convey enough of what he would say if he could. But Sora doesn't buy into it. Not that Riku really expects him to. Sora is arm-crossed, head-cocked, awaiting a response. And when it doesn't come, it's Sora's turn to sigh and prod and force the issue.

"Cut it out, Riku," he says softly. "I mean it."

And like it's a viable excuse, Riku says, "I had things to do, okay? I—I just—things came up. I had places to _go_ and things I had to _do_ and people I had to _please_." And Riku wants to kick himself for sounding like an idiot, because he's well aware that that is indeed exactly what he's sound like, but—but he tries a little harder. Says: "…And you were one of them, but I forgot that."

"Why did you forget?" Sora asks. He's judging Riku now, taking in the sight of him in order to determined whether he's truthful, whether he's trustworthy. Riku has seen the look before, years and years ago, and something still pulls and tugs within him at the sight of it. So, to avoid the sight of it, Riku has to look away again.

"Don't ask me that. I don't know," he says.

"I'll ask you what I want! What, Riku, am I just… _easily forgettable_ or something?"

And Riku shakes his head. "You're not forgettable."

"I don't get you."

"Join the club."

The judgment fades to some weak form of acceptance, and Sora moves a few steps closer. He stands several feet above Riku still, as Riku still stands on the ramp leading up from the stairwell. As Sora draws closer, he drops down—level with Riku's height, then below it. He comes up to Riku's nose and Riku realizes the kid hasn't grown as much vertically as he'd initially thought. Sora blinks, fidgets, and seems tempted to do something—hug, pat, punch, touch Riku in any way, but he also seems completely unable to bring himself to do so. So he crams his fisted hands in the front of his sweatshirt—some orange fleece thing that looks like it may once have had a hood before it got ripped off somehow.

Sora says, "Tidus told me it was the Syndicate."

"Well, Tidus has a pretty damn good argument going for him, seeing as that's what I told him all of a week ago."

"So why didn't you tell _me_ that?" he asks.

"Why do you have to go **on** about this?" Riku brushes past Sora in a way that he's sure comes across as being offensive, but he can't find it in himself to give as much of a damn about it as he rightfully should. Before him is the small city—capital of the Destati region, a small urban sprawl, dotted with small suburban outliers—pools, palms, and all the luxuries of island living, all coated in the thick black paint of night. On some level, Riku can understand the appeal in Sora's rooftop lifestyle. But on some other level, it just strikes Riku as terribly wrong—some lofty dreamer's ideal of being able to escape the world by towering above it instead.

Sora comes to stand beside him, though Riku doesn't really make any move to acknowledge his presence until he speaks. "I'm sorry," Sora tells him. "You could've just told me five minutes ago and I wouldn't have griped at you about it."

"What, and miss you being pissed off at me, Sora? Why would I want to go and waste a golden opportunity like that?"

"Go fall down somewhere, Riku."

"I could start with this building," Riku says with some grin-like expression. He takes two steps close to the edge, far enough so that if he stretched his leg, his toes would just peek out over the edge, into the air. He does so, and so sooner has he done it than is Sora making this whining noise, arms out, calling:

"Hey, hey, okay, I was kidding." And Riku only slides his foot further, teasingly along the edge. "_Riku_!" Sora snaps.

Point proven—though what the point _was_, Riku isn't quite sure—he backs down. Sora's hand clamps around his forearm, hauling him, without a word, back towards the center of the building. The touch seeps through the fabric of Riku's light coat, an instant warmth in a cool day that Riku can't help but think of as some sort of lamplight. Shaking off Sora's grip, Riku just smiles, says, "Calm down, Sora."

"Listen, can you just… I _know_ this is weird," Sora sighs.

"Weird doesn't even begin to describe it."

"Well whatever it is. Weird and then some. Can you just… can you just **stay** a while? Can you just tell me what you've been doing for seven years? I mean…" Hands are shoved back into pockets again, Sora's face a little pinker in the glow of the light nearby. "Can you do that, maybe?" he asks.

"I don't know."

"_What_?" Obviously this is not the sort of response Sora expected. With a voice and a look like his, he has an uncanny knack for building up sympathy and remorse when most needed. All things and regret aside, Riku isn't budging. This isn't to say he isn't unhappy about it, but he stands firm and concrete as the structure they stand on—one hand lifting up to capture his hair, blown wild from the wind, and tame it in a fist held by his neck.

He says, quite honestly, "I'm _sorry_, Sora, I really don't—well I don't know if I can, is all. I can tell you where I've been and… and I want to know where you've been and what you've been doing, too, it's just… There are things I can't tell you. I mean, you get that, right?"

Sora's expression takes on the look of a deflated balloon. "Yeah, I get it," he mumbles. "You're one of their little monkeys now, aren't you?"

Now Riku blinks a few times and wonders if the wind and the night and the lack of sleep are all adding up against him and taking their much-expected toll, driving him to insanity, schizophrenia, or some lesser form of telepathication. If that is a word at all, which is rather doubtful. Speaking of words, he still isn't quite sure he heard Sora right. "Monkey?"

"Yeah, a monkey," Sora tells him. "You just do tricks for them and waste all your time in that stupid little box over there doing whatever you can to make them happy."

Riku blinks again, though not from confusion this time, rather, because a strand of hair has whipped itself free and has just brutally stabbed him in the eye. Biting back a curse, Riku opts for light, out-of-place humor. "Is that jealousy I'm sensing?" he asks, all the while wondering what he would look like if he shaved all his damned hair clean off.

"Well so what if it is, Riku?" goes Sora, speaking of jealousy, not hair or the aftereffects of hair loss. "I watch you. I've _seen_ you, man," he says. "You're pathetic now."

Riku has no doubt, from where he stands, that the view into his office is perfectly clear, and, during the daylight hours, that it's a perfectly reasonable thing to do—spying on who so ever you please because you're blessed with such a nice vantage point and position of obscurity. So it isn't so much the fact the Sora watches Riku that bothers him—it's the fact that Sora judges Riku that bothers him. In his own defense, Riku jerks his thumb over towards the humming electrical gadget beside them, snapping, "Yeah, well, I'm not the boy with the spotlight and no life, now am I?"

"Hey, no, no, I have a life! I actually do things I **enjoy**."

"Like harassing me?"

"In part."

"What's the spotlight for?"

"It's my job!" Sora says, and Riku definitely doesn't imagine the slight puff Sora's chest takes on, or the way his shoulders square themselves, proud and… happily defiant.

"…_What_?"

"This company here." Sora taps his foot once, twice on the concrete beneath them, pointing down with one finger that creeps free from his hoodie. He says, "They pay me to shine that spotlight up in the air like that at night."

"…_Why_?" Riku briefly wonders if he's doomed to a life of accentuated monosyllabic questions from here on out.

"I dunno," Sora's saying. "Safety reasons? Communication with extra-terrestrials? _**I **_sure don't know."

"So basically what you're saying is, you're in the exact same position I'm in, the only difference being, my position is more pathetic."

Sora taps his chin childishly, ever the picture-perfect image of thought and contemplation. "Now that you mention it, yeah, yeah, that's pretty much it, Riku. Yeah, that's _exactly_ what I'm saying. Boy, you really _are_ smart."

"Knock it off."

Those three words seem to have an immense effect on Sora, though of all the three words in the English language to be blessed with such a power, who knows why it happens to be these three. More appropriate word combinations might include "Whatever you say," "More vodka, please," or even the oh-so-famed "I love you." But "Knock it off," despite seeming so mundane, so classic-less, causes Sora's face to split wide open into a brilliant grin, and Riku can't tell if his teeth are naturally that white or if this is all just some strange glowing effect brought about by the inconspicuous spotlight some eight feet away. And then, before he can even reach a conclusion, Riku finds himself captive, arms pinned at his sides in a firm hug, a bristle of Sora's brown hair tickling his earlobe as the he says: "You look good, Riku."

"So do you, kid." And Riku is completely aware of how dumb and senseless he sounds, but he reminds himself of all the excuses he has at his disposal for feeling out of sorts, and once again relaxes. No doubt, Sora feels that ease, that tension rushing out of stiff muscles and shooting out through skin and pores and into space, and feeling that, Sora can't help but grin again.

"This is good." He's talking into Riku's shoulder and wondering if sound waves can make bones shiver, for he's certain that's what he feels in Riku's body now. "Isn't it?"

"Yeah. It's good, Sora."

"I missed you," he continues. This time, though, he tilts his head back and up, trying to lock Riku's gaze, only to find the eyes passive, lax, staring off who knows where. But still Sora talks on. "And I was so mad when you just disappeared like that," he says, "and I didn't have any idea where you'd gone. I mean, I guess I kind of knew. But I didn't know, you know? And then Seifer kept telling me all these horror stories about what the D.R.S. _does_ to smart kids like you and it was just… really, really bad."

"I'm sorry."

"Sorry isn't good enough."

"Sorry's never good enough for anything anymore—I don't even know why people bother using it."

"Because they're saps like you."

"Alright then, I take it back."

The sound Sora makes falls somewhere between a snicker and a chuckle, for chuckles tend to be a sound that bubbles up from deep in the chest and snickers tend to be a sound similar to that of a cat coughing up a ball of hair—and though neither of these is the sound Sora makes, certain qualities from each mold themselves, however awkwardly together, to create that perfect _Sora sound_, that laugh so characteristic of the rooftop kid. He thinks about telling Riku how much it means to see him again, talk to him again, interact with him again, but one look at Riku and Sora is left unsure. He doesn't want to terrify or overwhelm, but equally bad would be to bore or under-whelm. Such, apparently, is the huge dilemma that comes with rekindling old acquaintances.

So Sora spends a few moments standing very close to Riku. Every once in a while, he chances a glance back at Riku's face, if not still trying to bring the man back into eye contact, then trying to discern what quality it is that Riku's taken on to make him look so old, so mature.

The evening ends near morning, Riku picking up his briefcase from its abandoned spot by the door. He's still in a daze when he promises Sora he'll be back to visit, when he swears he won't let another eight, nine, however many years roll by between them. And yet as soon as he's exited the building and chances a look back towards the sky and the bland yellow light shooting from the top of the building off into nothing, he can't entirely trust his own words.

Upon returning to his house, he does not fall into a peaceful slumber, nor does he lie wide awake, fending off troubled shadows of the darkness peering at him from all corners of the room. Instead, Riku spends the night at his desk in his small study, lamplight guiding his pen across sheets and sheets of paper, his hands white-knuckled, twined in his mop of hair. When he does fall asleep, it's a lopsided slumber—Riku draped carelessly over the loveseat of his office, legs trailing over stray books, over armrests, suspended in nighttime air.

x x x

When Riku excels, people _tell_ him he excels. This has always been the case, for as long as Riku can possibly remember. He is not—and never has been—the kind of guy to just bow and humble his way out of a spotlight. This is as much due to his own desire for recognition as it is due to the fact that Riku is just one of those few blessed people who looks so damn good in the spotlight and everyone knows so—accepts it as popular truth.

So when there comes a knock at his office door one Friday afternoon, Riku is only half surprised to hear the words: "Your superior is pleased with your work so far and would like to discuss your efforts." He hasn't, by this point, received any more notebooks in need of filling. In his haste to get as much done in as little time as possible, it actually appears rather likely that Riku has maybe over-extended himself and gotten each and every thing done far ahead of schedule. As a matter of fact, he has spent the past two days either face down on his desk in a semi-conscious state or pressed against the window, craning his neck every which way to try and catch a proper glimpse of the roof across the way.

But now he recognizes the man facing him as one of those he'd seen some weeks ago, silently accompanying his superior and stacking notebooks upon his desk. For the briefest of moments, Riku wonders if doing the superior's mundane tasks is this man's job, and if so, what Riku has to do to _get_ that job.

He is led, without another word, from his office, down the corridor, and through and around a series of turns, up a small flight of stairs, through more turns, up an isolated elevator that only services two, unnumbered floors, and into a small yet lavishly decorated hallway. The hall is painted a deep, forest green, gold-painting wood carvings running along the junctions of wall ceiling and floor, framed pictures of significant, angry looking people evenly spaced throughout. There are three doors—one to the left, one to the right, and one completely opposite of the elevator, double-doored and imposing. If it weren't for the hallway's stifling silence, Riku might remark on how stately, overpowering, and daunting the whole appearance is. However, before he can think twice on the matter, he is led to the door on the right.

The door swings silently shut behind him.

Riku's hopes and expectations to be delayed by a sweet-smiling secretary are dashed—he's face-to-face with his superior, the only separation between them being a thick leather chair and a thicker wooden desk, not to mention twelve feet of empty space.

"Do come in," the man says, and though Riku thinks he already is in, he obliges as best he can, striding forward and then sitting awkwardly on the chair set before the superior's desk.

On that desk, in front of the man, is Riku's third notebook—the Wall Notebook, shut and secure.

Riku spends some moments staring at the cover of the notebook, somehow hypnotized by the thing, though he'd seen it, touched it, loathed it, cursed it, and certainly written in it before, in the—well, not comfort perhaps, but security of his own office, under watchful eye of the plant and Sora. Here, the notebook takes on a whole new stance, it seems—leather-bound and angry, thicker than Riku remembers it being. His superior is in no particular hurry to talk to him, it seems. He's jotting down a rather long and involved something or other, apparently, on a brilliantly white legal pad. The pen he's using is sharp and gold and severe, obviously carefully selected to match the décor perfectly.

Finally, the man clears his throat, spins the end of his pen, tucks it away in a polished wood case—velvet lining, the whole nine yards. He slides the pad of paper off to one side and it almost looks as though he's feeling sorely tempted to indulge in a glass of fine brandy, glancing idly around the office for the liquor cabinet before finally giving up, surrendering to sobriety, and placing his elbows on his desk. He studies Riku for a good long moment, and then begins to talk.

"As a species," he says, "we should not be here on Earth because we are always killing each other in rather unnatural and, really, just _violent_ ways, wouldn't you say?" Riku assumes it's a rhetorical question, because the man hardly pauses long enough for Riku to take a breath, let alone utter a response. "You could even go so far as to say that we are… a _mistake_ of nature. The biggest mistake of nature, at that. When God planned us out on the blueprints of his day, he certainly must have taken into account such things as famine, disease, and epidemics of this and that. But I wonder if he took human nature and cold blooded killing into account." The man now thinks about this a moment before letting out a small, theatrical sigh and saying quietly, "Would that the last ice age had wiped clean the slate of the Earth entirely… Tell me, Riku, is there pleasure in the kill?"

The pause now is great enough and the man's gaze severe enough for Riku to know that he is actually expected to respond this time around. Only while he might have been prepared to interject before, the man's stare now fixed and waiting strikes Riku as being rather bizarre and completely unnerving. "No," Riku utters, voice rather raspy, much to his annoyance. He swallows. Trying again: "No, of course not."

"So why does man embrace such violence?" At this, Riku's superior lets out a deep and throaty chuckle, shaking his head back and forth, slowly, slowly. "…Riku, Riku, Riku, you're here to _think_, are you not?"

"Yes, but this has nothing to do with—"

"So. _Think_."

Though it's probably completely needless to say it, Riku is beyond frustrated. No number of paychecks, no amount of fake flora decorating his office can make up a perfectly rude, snobby, cocky superior who blatantly squashes any hope Riku's had of receiving a simple pat on the back, a friendly "Good job so far, and welcome to the company!" Obviously, this man's just playing with Riku, for whatever reason, or using him as an ear to receive whatever postmodern thoughts on war he has rattling around his bulbous, balding cranium. Frankly, Riku can't stand it. Frankly, Riku can't understand why the guy isn't just taking advantage of any number of his lap dog servants and preaching to them instead. Why Riku—who was perfectly content to sleep in his office the rest of the day and welcome a weekend without so much as a second thought?

No, really, Riku is sick of the guy and he's not been in the room with him more than five minutes.

Still, Riku manages to grit out a restatement of his prior words in: "No, there's no… there's no pleasure in murder."

"What about war?" the man asks.

"War _is_ murder," Riku growls.

"Is it?" The man smiles, clasps his hands, leads forward over his imposing desk. He says, "Such a _pacifist_. For some reason I never would have pegged you as one."

"Listen this is… this is a ridiculous subject. We're talking _morals_. Not _logistics_. It's my opinion and my… I don't know. I think that there's no glory in that. There's my _thought_ for you." In his own mind, Riku has very precise and clear explanations, ordered in A, B, C outline form, as to why he, as an employee, is entirely within his own right to express such an opinion, if rather tersely. Obviously, his superior isn't about to bother with outline explanations. He doesn't even seem to realize how angry, frustrated, and utterly annoyed Riku is with him. Or, if he does realize, the dippy smile on his face is one of intense pleasure that comes from meddling with the brains of others.

"But we are, by our very nature, quite violent…?"

"And I disagree," Riku says.

"Tell me _why_."

"With all due respect, _sir_, you initially asked me here to discuss this paper."

"…I understand, Riku."

And, just like that, it appears Riku has—if not won the argument, than at least put it off until later. He's neither dumb nor naïve enough to fool himself into thinking of this as some sort of triumph. It's more like a brief intermission. He knows that somehow, in some way, this conversation is bound to be one of those seemingly mundane things that will only come back and bite him in the ass with a wicked breed of vengeance later on. No need to stress about it now, though, he figures, for his superior has dropped all hints and quirks of amusement and is now all serious, all focused on the Wall Notebook.

"This is interesting, what you've written," he tells Riku. After a few awkward seconds in which Riku is simply sitting there, not entirely sure of what to say or do, his superior looks up, makes eye contact. "So," the man says. He steeples his fingers together and leans forward again, always on the edge of the desk, apparently, always poised and on the verge of saying something that requires that extra zeal of leaning forward, secret-sharing-like, confiding-like. He asks Riku, "Do you believe it? What you wrote?"

"I—well, yes. …Sir." _What a stupid question._

And yet the second the man smiles, Riku instantly knows he's made a mistake. Somehow he's gone and gotten his steps all confused and now he's played himself into whatever position this man expected of him—or if not expected, than at least wistfully hoped for. He chuckles again, leans back in his chair, asks Riku quite easily if he's an, "Idealist?" A pause, an even more humorous look. "Or naïve?" Still another pause, and then an expression of mock understanding, like Riku is a label of ingredients on a can of soup and his secret ingredient has just been written plain out, not so much a secret as a big fat error in the packaging industry.

"You appear to be _both_," the man tells him. "Nonetheless, you've made headway since your first pitiful attempt on this subject."

Sliding the Wall Notebook to the side, Riku's superior reveals a very rigidly lined stack of papers, all with the precise black-penned lettering of Riku's youth dancing across the page. Sure enough, it's the essay Riku wrote years and years ago, back in his testing days, back in the days when prodigy status was still desirable, still attainable. Upon seeing Riku's shocked expression, the man's smile only widens. He nods. Says, "We do keep these things around. It's good to see that our employees make progress. Progress keeps us ahead of the game. But you already know that. If you didn't know that, you wouldn't be here, I'm sure. But what _I'd_ like to know, Riku, is how you see this theory of yours playing out in reality. Forget the storybook element of it all. Here's your chance to explain it to me face to face. How _exactly_ would your idea break the wall?"

"I…" Riku fights back a scowl, confining it to the recesses of his mind where it's neither felt nor seen. He blabs out, "It, just, it says. In there."

"No, it grazes the surface of the half-develop idea you build this essay up to." Clearly, the man enjoys the fact that Riku's self-confidence in defending his position and his credibility isn't quite enough to stand a chance against him. That smile is still embedded on his face, like it's been etched there all along and Riku's only started to notice its permanence. "Tell me," he says. "_Really_, this time. What's the reality of it?"

"Look, if it's not good enough, just scrap it. Or if that's not what you want, then give it to me and I'll rewrite it." Ignoring the fact that Riku is debating flinging himself out the window—dooming himself to the same fate as his career, no doubt—his display of guts is quite impressive, and his superior even tones down the grin, raises an eyebrow in acknowledgement of it. Riku grits his teeth and presses on, careful as he can. "It doesn't do you any good walking all over me when you know I'm being paid to write, not to talk."

"And yet you talk beautifully."

"I'll rewrite it."

"I think not," the man drawls. He blinks, once, twice, seeming to age drastically in the span of a few moments, a hand coming up, waving off the suggestion—_Rewrite? No, never._ "Not right now, at least. I need _time_, Riku. Time to think it over. And so do you. Not much time, mind you. But time all the same. After all," he said. "Rome wasn't built in a day. Or so they say."

"Right…"

"You can see yourself out, I hope?" he asks.

"Of course."

"Oh, and Riku. One last thing. I have a special guest I would like for you to speak with for the next few days or so. She's a graduate student from Destati U—writing her thesis on D.R.S. policy and… so on. I trust you'll take good care of her."

"I'll do my best."

"Good." Again, Riku turns to leave. This time he makes it to the door—where the man from before stands waiting to escort him—before his superior speaks again, one last time. "And Riku?" he says. "You will think about our little discussion, won't you?"

"Of course."

x x x

Riku knows he's not alone as soon as he enters his home. Mostly it's because of a certain vibe that comes from people and their presence, and mostly it's because Riku is so used to entering a home completely devoid of this vibe that he pick up on it right away. …Actually, it's really just a matter of his key uselessly clacking in around the lock that is, as a matter of fact, very unlocked. For some reason he can't quite explain, Riku finds himself not wanting to breathe anymore. He curses his work habits and hates the fact that it's dark and hates even more the fact that he never bothered to replace the bulb for the lamp in his living room. He feels a rather questionable suck and plummet disturbance wracking havoc on his stomach and, swallowing thickly, Riku nudges the door open with his toe.

From what little light enters the living room, Riku can only see that everything appears to be exactly as he'd left it that morning. The paper is sprawled just so on the coffee table, tucked under an empty cereal bowl he meant to wash out, but obviously didn't. Nothing is disturbed, nothing is altered. And yet even though Riku knows the act is pointless, he finds himself anxiously grappling at the light switch, jerking it up then down then up again, hoping that some miracle wills life back into the bulb, just for all of two seconds. Nothing. Just darkness.

_All right. I'm being an idiot. Enough of this crap._

Straightening his shoulders and sucking in a breath, Riku strides over into the kitchen with a briskness he hopes conveys more self-confidence than it does hurry or worry. Heaping his belongings on the kitchen table, his hands flutter to his tie, expecting, by habit, to go about the daily ritual of loosening the noose and allowing a little air. But they pause on the way, two inches from his neck, Riku's eyes glued to the hallway branching off from the kitchen, deeper into the condo. A beam of weakened yellow light is painted across the ground, stretching from his bedroom, where the door stands agape all of two inches.

_Oh __**Christ**_

Whatever resolve and whatever ego Riku has bolstered himself with instantly falls. If ego and resolve were the trousers of his safety, this is to say that their suspenders were cut, and they were now bunched uselessly at his ankles. Thankfully, Riku does not think deep enough into the situation to come to this analogy. Instead, he grabs a dented frying pan from where it hands above the stove, slides off his penny loafers and slides across the hardwood in socked feet, into the hallway.

"Hello?' Riku doesn't know why he even says anything—as soon as he does, he wants to bash his own skull in with the frying pan for being such a dolt. What better way than to let a cat burglar or axe murderer or escape convict know you're home and alone than to call right on out into the empty house and pinpoint your exact location. Riku wonders if he should pause from his headlong rush into likely death to write a will. It might be nice to leave some things to some people, though off the top of his frantic, adrenaline pumped head, he can't really think of anyone he'd leave anything to. Swallowing hard, Riku steels himself for a few seconds, preparing for the worst. Then, with all the flourish and flair he'd soaked up from television's cop-excursions, he flings the bedroom door wide open, frying pan at the ready to bash in…

"_SORA_."

"Riku! Look at this little thing!" Sure enough, Sora's across the room, hands cupped and oozing with a puddle of hamster, who is studying Sora with quite a rapt attention, only pausing every few seconds to wipe her face with her own spittle.

"What are you doing?" Riku asks. He lowers the frying pan, then drops it once he sees Sora's eyes honing in on it. Determined not to let Sora get the question out, Riku decides to beat him to the punch, ask his questions first, because certainly, certainly, his are more pressing. "Sora, what the hell are you doing in my house?!" For one. "And why are you holding my hamster?" For another.

"I'm cleaning his cage. You're gonna kill him, leaving him in that mess like that," Sora says.

"Dio is a girl, Sora. And that's not what I meant anyway! What are you doing in here? Did you _break into my __**house**_?"

Sora sniffs indignantly and turns his gaze back to the hamster, who seems, at this moment, to be a much more friendly and open recipient of his affections. Still, he chimes, "Don't be rude, Riku. _God_. You left the door unlocked."

"…No I _didn't_."

"…Uh, **yes** you **did**."

"No, Sora, I definitely didn't. I never _leave_ the door un_locked_!"

Sora's mouth puckers and twists itself into an upside-down V, and Riku is sorely tempted to confess to Sora that he always did think the kid belonged in a remake of Little Rascals, Leave it to Beaver, or some other show heaping on comic relief and family values, where such expressions were actually considered classic. And Riku actually opens his mouth to say so, just because he feels like being harsh, but before he can—

"Well, gee, Riku. Search me for lock picks, why don't you? I don't even _know_ how to pick a lock! I might live on a roof and operate a spotlight for a living, but I'm not a _vagabond_."

"Vagabond?"

"What, you don't think I know big words, too?" Sora moves to slip Dio into his hoodie pocket, then pauses halfway through the act, thinking better of it. Clearly still debating what to do with the little beast, Sora strokes the top of her head and says rather grumpily, "The door was unlocked and cracked open and I thought you were home. You weren't, but I didn't know. And maybe you could've been lying in here _dying_—I wouldn't know that, either. But either way, this place reeked of something, so I came in here to clean your hamster who didn't even have any food or water, Riku."

"I never leave the door unlocked," Riku says again, more to himself than anyone else really—hamster and human alike. He sits on his bed and wants to just fall backwards into it entirely—curl up and forget this day ever happened. I never leave the door unlocked, he thinks to himself again. He whispers the words as well, but they're too soft to hear and because Sora's unaware he's doing it, he speaks over the last hushed syllables of Riku's thoughts and words.

"Well this time you did!" he's saying. He's got Dio held in both hands, and Riku hopes the thing pisses on Sora so Sora will understand what a disgusting little beast she truly is. But Dio does no such thing and Sora is getting himself wound up tighter and tighter, all just because Riku happened to accuse him of breaking and entering. Sora says: "You're not perfect! Everyone forgets to lock doors sometimes—we're people! We're forgetful." And then, as a definite afterthought, Sora throws up a finger, dislodging the hamster only for a brief second, adding, "But that's **not** an excuse for _you_ forgetting _me_."

"There you go again." Dio is suddenly launched onto Riku's defenseless chest, and she bounces once, twice, and then proceeds to take a rather fierce piss on Riku's stomach. "**ACK**."

"Hold her. I'm going to wash this in your sink," Sora says. He's stooping to pick up the hamster tank and it's all a rather awkward progress for him because his arms just aren't quite long enough to get a good grasp on the thing and he's going about holding it all the wrong ways and Riku doesn't even want to bother trying to instruct him—mostly because Riku himself doesn't even remember how to properly attend to the thing in the first place. But first and foremost on his mind is his own personal health.

"Sora, don't be disgusting," Riku says. "I do dishes in that sink. And I _eat_ off those dishes after I do them."

"Then maybe you should've thought about that before you tried to kill your pet!" Sora shouts before promptly disappearing from view into the hallway, tank cradled awkwardly against his spindly chest. Several seconds later, there is a dull thud, a muffled curse, and then Sora's rather frazzled: "I'm fine!"

Dio blinks at Riku. Inside, she's still digesting the left foot of her fifth baby.

"You," Riku tells her, "are a stupid piece of shit and I'm going to watch you die one day. And I'll be so happy."

All jesting aside, Riku still hasn't had a good day and no amounts of macabre fantasies of hamster killing are apt to change it. He decides right then and there that he never should have been born smart. Or, at the very least, he never should have taken advantage of it. In this one instant, Riku finds himself wishing he could project himself back in time to his earliest youth and consciously _choose_ not to be intelligent. He is sure the choice can be made—or rather, could have made, once long ago. All it would have required was the proper insight, the proper_ fore_sight to know and fear all that accompanies overachievement.

Sora comes back in the room and, pleasantly enough, lucks Dio up from her soiled seat on Riku's chest, tucking her back inside her clean cage. Smiling at his handiwork, Sora hooks his thumbs through his belt loops and grins. "There," he says. "That's better." And then, almost as though he's forgotten Riku's presence the room, Sora turns around to face the other. "So," he says.

"So," Riku responds.

In her cage, Dio resettles herself on the rim of her food bowl, gorging on a sunflower seed and watching the scene unfold.

"…How was work?"

"Sora, what are you doing here?"

"You weren't going to come back to see me, were you?" Sora asks. He doesn't want to sound meek, but he is afraid he does—and the fact of the matter is, he really does. So he grows frustrated and turns slightly pink in the face, only growing pinker as Riku's hands fly up into the air for a few exasperated moments.

"Of _course_ I would have," Riku finds himself claiming, though he knows it's probably not the truth. So, to make amends, he bends it enough to make it something of a half-truth, at the very least. He adds, "Just… not right now."

"Why?"

"_Je_sus, Sora. _Because_. That's why. Because all this is really, really sudden, and I have no idea what the hell I'm doing. I'm in a new job, I'm living a new life—everything is completely different now, and then you just come… charging back in." Riku can't help but glare now, in part because Sora's attitude is striking him as being terribly selfish and immature, and in part because he now smells strongly of hamster urine. "We're not twelve, okay?" he says. "We don't know each other anymore."

Sora swallows. "I was eleven."

"_Eleven_, okay. I'm sorry." Were we a camera positioned immediately in front of Riku's face at this moment, we might catch a trace of some strange, foreign emotion creeping up on his face for the smallest of instances, right before immediately scuttling off and away. In fact, were we indeed a camera, we would have to rewind and replay ourselves in slow-motion, time and time again, perhaps, just to catch that trace of a thing, whatever it is.

When Riku speaks again, he does so in sympathy. Were he not so stubborn and no so set, he might even go so far as to touch Sora—place a hand on his shoulder, a pat on his arm—but he knows well that to touch Sora would be much in the same to signing his own living will. It will bring about the end of it all—the end of his argument, the end of his point. His point, which he tries to say with sorrow: "What I did to you was so wrong."

Sora's brows are drawn together, and if Riku focuses just hard enough, he can make out the faintest line between them, a mark of Sora's concentration and, for some reason, ridiculously endearing. Riku almost smiles. Almost. Up until Sora asks in monotone:

"Which _part_ of it."

"All of it," comes the immediate response.

And just as quick: "_Not_ all of it."

"Yes, Sora, _all_ of it." Riku feels himself rapidly approaching a chasm of metaphorical proportions and he hasn't the slightest idea what to do about it. Of all the possible times Sora could choose to drop in and spoil his life again—of course it has to be now. It has to be when everything is crazy and wrong, when everything is rotten and awful, when Riku is so vulnerable and so hating his vulnerability. He doesn't want to address the elephant in the room, he just wants to tie a swing to the tusks of the mammoth thing and sit there, swinging, pondering life in general until the end finally does come. Riku stubs his toe on the beast and own his skin flushes, his own voice breaks. "You know what I'm talking about," he says.

Sora's bottom lip seems to want to jut out, but it takes all the willpower Sora has to stay the thing, to keep some level of maturity about himself. But as soon as he controls his face, he finds his arms crossed—petulant. Whiney. Sora turns pink again. "Well," he says. "I didn't think so. It wasn't wrong. And I don't think **you** really think it was wrong, either. Not _really_."

Numbly and dumbly, Riku rolls onto his side. In his head he toes the chasm, in the room he sits on the elephant. There's no way out of a crap situation like this—nothing to do but surrender and cry about it. And that's exactly what Riku proceeds to do. In his head, there's a Sora across from him, on the other side of the chasm and _that_ Sora is pure and adorable and angelic and utterly, painfully perfect. The thought hurts—it physically _pains_ Riku to think about the Perfect Sora, just to open his eyes and see the Sora before him now. And there can only be one reason for the difference, there can only be one cause for the change. "I screwed you up, didn't I?" Riku mumbles. "God, this is why you're living on a roof. I left you emotionally unstable and physically… unwell."

"Oh shut up, Riku. You did not."

"You're so fucked up. You're just… deranged or… or something. Hell, I don't even know what's wrong with you."

"Nothing's wrong with me!"

"Of course something's wrong with you Sora, stop being an idiot. Normal, fine people don't just walk into the homes of their childhood… their childhood _friends_ or, or whatever when they're not home and, and clean their hamsters!"

"Okay, so I'm not normal. But I'm not deranged. I really resent that, Riku. You think I'm deranged."

"Of course I think you're deranged!"

"You think my head's not on straight."

"Of course your head's not on straight—stop talking me in damn _circles_ here!"

Sora smiles—for what reason, even he can't tell—and moves towards the bed. Hands and knees, he crawls across until he towers over Riku, who, in turn, promptly heaves a mighty sigh and opens his mouth to blame himself some more. But Sora shakes his head, and as Riku rolls to face away, he breaks whatever stood between them and gently prods Riku's shoulder. "Hey, come on, calm down," he says. His arms bend and he lets himself down onto the bed beside Riku, who adamantly stays faced away. Because he wants to, or because he wants Riku to at least know and feel he's there, Sora cautiously loops one arm up and around the other man's chest.

Riku's breath hitches.

"Ugh, get off." He shrugs his shoulders, jerks Sora's arm off, says lamely, "I… I smell. You threw the hamster. You know."

"So take it off." Riku knows Sora's talking about the shirt and Riku promptly rolls onto his back, pauses, then makes the effort to roll the remaining forty-five degrees to face Sora.

"Sora," he says, "come on, go… go back to your roof… thing."

Strangely enough, Sora's face undergoes the same metamorphosis it had earlier, only completely different at the same time—for whatever sense that makes. Just as Riku's "Knock it off" of the night before had the power to flip a switch of thousand volt power and light up the boy, Riku's indifference in these few last words had the instantaneous effect of widened, hurt blue eyes and Sora's hands bunching into the front of his own hoodie, clutching at the fabric like a lifeline. Riku has never seen anything more pitiful in his life, and he strongly considers the fact that he's the definite scum of the earth when Sora asks, "Do you really hate me that much? That you can't stand to be near me anymore?"

"No, Sora..."

"Do you want me to go away? Is that what you want?"

"I don't know, Sora..." Riku rolls onto his back once more, having torn his eyes away from the pitiful Sora beside him.

"I don't get it." Sora reaches up, and in the yellow lamplight, his hand falls silent and soft on Riku's chest. The shirt is clean there, at least. Beneath his hand beats the heart and Sora says, "You told me you felt it, too."

"I did. I do. I always have." Riku has to close his eyes when he says insane things, and he closes them now. Sora's hand is like sunlight and he hasn't realized until this very moment how cold it'd been outside, how the cold had clung to him still, in the bedroom, after the day.

"Then what's so wrong, Riku?" Sora asks. "I'm here again," he says. "_You're_ here again. I thought you'd be happy." And if Riku were to do himself a favor and open his eyes, he might see just how at ease Sora is, just how natural he finds it all. For him, there's no doubt in his mind of where he's supposed to be, and no job, no duty that can keep him from being there. But it appears, for whatever reason, that Riku is not so simple, that Riku is not so eased by the lame notions of "meant-to-be's" and perfections.

And Sora seems to realize this in these few moments, though the realization is slow in coming and almost brutally painful. The fact that Riku isn't looking at him doesn't mean his face doesn't turn seven shades sadder as his hand withdraws from Riku, finding its way back to the front of his own clothing where it twines and fists into it again. "Well," he says awkwardly, "Don't worry about locking your door anymore. I won't come and bother you."

"You're not who I'm worried about." Riku doesn't know why he says it, because he's not really sure who else he has to be worried about. Some subconscious specter of a thing just happens to have appeared and tickled the words right out of him.

"What's that mean?" A moment later, when there is still no response, Sora asks the question again, thinking maybe Riku hadn't heard the first time. But still, Riku says nothing. Still obsessed with his secrets. "This is so weird."

"You know what I'm about to say," says Riku.

"'Weird doesn't even begin to describe it.'" Sora lets out a little sigh. He blinks, fixing his intense stare on Riku, following the lines of his profile and asking him, quietly, "Do you still feel it?"

Riku nods. Sora says, "Me too." And then, "I'm glad."

And Riku, for all that he's still confused as hell and hating himself for it, is glad, too. Sora's hand has found its way to his chest again, and his index finger is just barely tapping along with Riku's heartbeat, like a nervous tic Sora probably isn't even aware he's doing.

"Riku?" he asks after a moment of this silence.

"Mm."

"You're not telling me a story."

"Come off it, Sora. You're not _eleven_, either."

"So?"

"So go to sleep if you're gonna go to sleep, or go home if you're gonna go home."

"Fine. But you owe me a story."

"Idiot."

"Jerk."

"Freak."

"_Hey_…"

"Shut up, Sora."

"…Do you want to know the real reason I tried to find you now?" Sora asks in the dark. Riku feels the mattress shift, knows Sora is turned on his side, looking at him, trying to confide in him. His voice is still soft when he says it, but there's a trace of something else Riku can't quite place, mixed in with his words. Sora says, "Something's about to happen. They're building a wall. I see them working in the night, from the top of the tower when no one's awake, in parts of the city where no one goes anymore. I wonder why no one notices. They're _building_ a _wall_. Why would they want to build a wall?"

When Riku says nothing, Sora bites his bottom lip, eventually looks away. After another moment or so, the shift comes again. Sora is on his back, staring at the ceiling. Soon, his eyes close, but the unasked question still silently hangs in the room. The purpose of a wall.

_To keep people out or to keep people in?_

x x x

Riku can't sleep.

It could be for any number of reasons—for the way the moonlight pours in through the window, for the way Dio's wheel squeaks every so slightly on each rotation, the hamster powering it along through the night. Whatever the reason, the numbers on the digital clock read 1:38 A.M. and Sora is fast asleep beside him. The boy's been careful enough not to touch Riku in any way, not to push the envelope any further than he already has. The only invitation he's openly left for Riku is in his right hand, stretched across the small space between their two bodies, lax and open and waiting.

But none of these are responsible for keeping Riku awake. And it takes him a few more minutes of silent thought to figure out what it could be. He gets up, quiet as he can, slipping across the floor and out the bedroom door, mentally kicking himself for even bothering to care about whether Sora wakes up or not—it's not like Riku asked he stay the night. But there's some sweet comfort in another human being in the house with him. This is what Riku tells himself. It would be the same with anyone—Sora or not.

For lack of anything better to do, Riku returns to his living room, where he stares at the front door long and hard before stepping forward to check that it's locked. And once checked, he pulls the deadbolt and turns back around. He attends to the cereal bowl left out, puts the old newspaper in the recycling bin, and gets a drink of water, leaning against the kitchen counter and thinking. Tomorrow is Saturday. He doesn't have to worry about superiors or office lights or grad student chaperoning of any kind, papers or politics or questions of morals and intellect. Riku can't help but sigh. It's a strange and heavy load to carry.

As he heads back towards his bedroom, determined to get some sleep, he is stopped in his tracks by one thing and one thing alone. Dio is rolled into a ball, tucked against the far right corner of her cage—visible through the open door. She watches Riku with small, black eyes that catch the moonlight. And for some strange reason, unknown even to him, Riku abruptly turns right himself, reaches out a hand and turns the knob of his office door, pushing back the wood and peering into the darkness.

The window is wide open, a chill breeze gusting in, wrecking a continued havoc on each and every loose leaf that had so carefully been tucked and sealed away into proper folders, cabinets, notebooks and clipboards. The place is a wreck, the window screen completely gone—lying lord knows where—books toppled over, cushions overturned from the loveseat, the file cabinet tilted on its side, spilling out its contents into sorry paper puddles on the floor. Riku stands, without a word, in front of it all. His mouth hangs open, his body registers shock and something rather akin to terror, but his mind is strangely calm. It replays Sora's words, smooth and liquid and warm and curious.

_Something's about to happen. They're building a wall._

(x) (x) (x)

As always, feedback is _grrreatly_ appreciated, especially with this beast of a thing. If you're not going to leave a review, than do, kindly, mail me a hearty slice of chocolate cake—which is basically the equivalent of a review. The only difference between the two is that one will make me fat and the other will not. But _both_ will make me smile.

Thank you, and have a spectacular, spectacular Thanksgiving—if you're 'Merican and politically incorrect! I have a **wonderful** recipe for cranberry bread I'm just **dying** to share with you all.


	3. Of the Sun, Part Three

**Like I Killed The Giants**

'Of The Sun, Part Three'

For the next few days, Riku wonders what exactly it is that happened in his home that night. He goes about the quiet routine of repairing the window in his office, righting file cabinets and fixing everything back into its previous and proper place. But still the entire event remains a mystery, simply because he wants to force the seemingly obvious out of his head. Sora's presence in his home the night of the break-in doesn't make him a culprit—it simply makes him a suspect, and a suspect that Riku doesn't really want to pursue the investigation of, at that.

Monday morning, he strolls into work, coffee in one hand, briefcase in the other, eyelids drooping somewhere very near half mast. The elevator trip up is a nonevent, the stroll down the corridor to his office much the same. He enjoys the rare pleasure of finding another living body in the hall with him, so his mood is lifted somewhat—it's the squirrel of his superior, that man who's got the job he wants, the scuttling job, the retrieving job. He passes Riku, gives him a nod, and blinks awkwardly at the vibrant grin Riku shoots his way.

And yet for all of his superior's bland little alert from last week's end as to his future task of chaperoning some dopey student around for a few days, Riku is in some state bordering complete and utter shock when he enters his office to find some strange, unknown young woman standing in the dead center of it. Immediately, he turns around to ask the Squirrelly Man (for he's absolutely sure he's the one responsible for all this) just what the hell is going on, but naturally, the guy's gone and is nowhere to be found. Staring mutely at the door, Riku can't help but bristle when he hears a small, awkward "Um?" come from the mouth of the woman now behind him, now painfully aware of his rather stupid, rather unprofessional presence.

Tweed pencil skirt and cream-colored pea coat, the woman who introduces herself as Olette is, in this very instant, the image of the ideal student. Her nails are clean and trimmed, her posture straight but not rigid, her words fluid but not greasy, her smile half a step short of sincere and two steps beyond polite. "You must be Riku Okada," she says.

"Just Riku, thanks." Riku makes to put his briefcase on his desk, and tries to act like stubbing his toe on the chair and slopping his coffee on the carpet is all part of the process. Olette just smiles through it all, still standing in the center of the room, and it is roughly at that point that Riku catches sight of a chair opposite his own that definitely wasn't there the last time he'd been in. The fake plant is still by the window, yes, but unless the plant reproduces by mean of leather furniture, someone's up and been in here over the weekend, turning Riku's desk back around to face its original window-bound direction, now including a sleek, leather lounge as well. He can't tell if it's a reward for something or just an act some higher power is putting on for the sake of… a student.

"Uh, you can… sit, you know," he bumbles awkwardly. Olette does. So does he. _Well,_ he thinks to himself, _this is going swimmingly_. He wonders half a moment why he hears a distant squelch sound as his shifts his feet around under his desk. Then he remembers spilled coffee. It is Monday, after all.

From across the desk, Olette unsnaps her purse, one hand slipping in, rummaging around. Riku hopes she's taking out a gun to shoot him, because not only would it put him out of his mundane misery, but it would also add some spice to the office life. Instead, she pulls out a pen, and Riku—giving her one more glance over—sadly determines that Olette is just not the type to leap across the desk with a snarl, send him knocking backwards in his chair, and then proceed to stab him brutally in the neck and chest with a blood-spattered ballpoint. It was a thought at least, and so he resigns to boredom.

"So," he says.

"Thank you for having me," she says.

"Uh. Not a problem. What exactly can I do for you, anyway?"

She asks him if anyone—his superior, perhaps—had explained her thesis to him. He says they haven't, and almost feels the urge to point out that the building, and the world, might be focused around more important things than her pathetic little paper topic, but he just leaves it at a simple 'no' and Olette dutifully fills him in. The thesis, she informs him, is a study of restrictive policies enacted by the D.R.S. following the coup d'etate and establishment of Syndicate order some forty-two years ago.

"Of course," she goes on to say, "I'm not exactly bashing the organization or trying to make a statement. See, that's really the only reason I'm allowed to write the paper in the first place." She takes a moment to fix Riku with a strong stare and her meaning is pretty much evident. She _would_—if she could, Riku assumes—pull out the flame guns and have at thee, but by claiming neutrality, hopefully she can at least write a paper without receiving any flak from the powers that be. "I've done most of the research—the histories, the primaries, the—I've _done_ all that, of course. What I need to wrap my paper up now is a study of the organization to date, including its '_civilian'_ employees."

Riku blinks at the emphasized word. _Civilian_. "I **am** a civilian," he says blandly.

Olette just stares at him for a minute, very, very blankly, and then goes on talking. "So you can give me your personal opinion for any of the questions I ask—just be honest. I'm not going to publish anything I think will hurt you or me, I promise. I mean, I know you don't know me, so my word's no good to you, but the fact is there in case you were curious. I'm not looking to jeopardize anyone, especially since you were willing to help me out in the first place."

For reasons unknown to him, Riku can't help but feel annoyed. This girl seems the type to talk on and on for ages if left unchecked. What the hell made her think she could take interviews in the first place? _It feels more like she's giving them herself. No one asked her anything. As if she knows anything to begin with._ So when Riku starts flapping his gums rather rudely, he's only half aware of it because most of his common sense in buried away, deep inside his head, mentally seething over Olette's incapability.

"Look, I didn't _ask_ for you to come interview me."

She blinks. "You didn't?"

Incredulous, Riku rolls his eyes, palms sweaty and itchy on his desktop before him. "_No_," he says. "Why the hell would I ask to have some _stranger_ come in here and prance around like she knows something? You're—what—some liberal arts guru in your professors' eyes, who, by the way, have probably all have pooled together in the lounge after classes and cooed and awed over how damn _special_ you are? Get. Real. Whatever crap paper you write won't exactly change anything that's going on today, and sure as _hell_ won't change anything that's going on tomorrow."

By the time Riku's done, Olette is across from him, wide-eyed and stunned, freshly broken pen cap in hand. She blinks a few times, and then clears her throat awkwardly. Inside, Riku tries to ignore the fact that he's about near bubbling over with some sick sense of satisfaction from the outburst. To control himself, he tries diverting his attention by tapping his left foot, only to grow more annoyed by the squelch of the carpet there.

"Well," Olette finally says, "I… believe you when you say you didn't want to me to interview you. I mean. …_Obviously_. But. What… exactly did I do to make you _hate_ me? I've been here for less than ten minutes."

"Your point?"

"…Nothing. It's nothing."

Riku spends a few moments studying Olette, simply because she's in his presence, right there in front of him, up for the studying—and she's gone and clenched her jaw in such a way that the force of the act looks about ready to leave all her teeth shattered and busted. So, for the sake of her teeth, Riku ponders the girl and what he can do about her, if he was too harsh on her, if he was too soft. Determining that he treated her perfectly all right and all, Riku just gives his shoulders this slow and careless shrug, says, "If you have questions, I'll answer them. You're here to write a paper—I'm here because my boss told me to be here."

"I asked him to put me with someone who would be happy to have me," came her moody response.

"Who?"

"The professor who _gave_ me the contact to this office. But obviously he was completely mistaken, so just forget about it."

_Melodramatic—just like a woman. _Resisting the strong urge to boot the girl out the door—the good riddance it would be—he instead just cradles his head in one hand, giving her a bored stare. She stares back, not bored, but angry, and doing little to conceal it. _So fine. Maybe I was hard on her. Who cares? She's a pompous bitch; I'm going to be a pompous bastard. Fair's fair._ _But_… "Look. I don't feel like wasting eight hours staring at you," he comes to saying. "No offense. You're a lovely lady or whatever. But why don't you just ask me whatever the hell it is you have to ask me and we can both get out of each other's hair."

"You mean it?" she asked.

"_Why_ would I say it if I didn't?"

And just like that, she straightens her spine, smoothes her skirt, and retrieves from her purse a small, dainty little notebook, just about the same time as she retrieves from the depths of her mouth that serene little smile that up and paints itself on her lips. She uncaps her pen and says, "Thank you, Riku," not out of genuine thanks, but out of obligation and a strong commitment to the ideal that if one treats others well, one will be treated well in return. So far, this policy has done little for Olette's case, but she assumes that Riku is simply being a hard ass and will soften up eventually. Little does she know.

"First off, how did you come into working for the Syndicate? Aside from the tests and all that."

Riku doesn't actually respond correctly right off the bat. This is odd in itself, not just because it's a simple interview and it would seem that a wrong answer is near impossible, but because the words he begins to speak aren't actually his own. They are, in fact, copyrighted property of the Syndicate itself, a few lines plucked here and there from the introductory manual he'd received prior to the job—a detailed, pseudo-friendly introduction of purpose, planning, and procedures. Whether or not Olette has read the manual—which seems unlikely, if not impossible—or whether she simply has an obscure knack for picking up plagiarized speech, she stops him halfway through his ramble. Again, she asks him for his own opinion. Again she tells him she's on his side.

And again, Riku isn't the least bit comforted by this assurance because he didn't even know he had a side prior to now. More importantly, if he does indeed have a side, which side is he on? Or is it his very own? _And if everyone has their own side in life, then how is it possible for anyone to be on anyone else's side if each of them has their own side to maintain? A still __**larger**__ question—what on earth are all these sides amounting to? What shape has that many sides in the first place? A circle? Without a doubt. Infinite sides means no sides at all. So, in conclusion, we're all on the same side because there is no side._

By this point, Olette is staring very, very fixedly at Riku's eyes and is completely thrown off by the fact that she—in spite of her feeble little efforts—just can't seem to bring him to make eye contact with her. He is meeting her gaze, but he's not engaged in it and it's so painfully obvious that he's completely lost within his own mind that it almost makes the girl want to throw down her pen and throw up her arms and have done with the whole damn thing—she _certainly_ hadn't known it'd be such a terribly trying ordeal.

"Riku," she prods. Riku blinks. "Riku?" she says again.

"Huh?"

"Did… you have anything to say? About the Syndicate? About how they picked you out?"

His mental wanderings seem to have done him some good at the very least, for his tongue's a bit looser, his mind a bit less sealed, and slowly but surely he begins to recite the story from one page of his boring childhood, prior to a life of regulated thought and philosophy. "I don't know," he tells her. "They sent back tests results, and once that was over they had an assembly at school. Everyone with a score higher than this stayed, everyone with a score less than this went back to class. Now that I think about it, I never went back to class after that assembly. They just pulled us from public school and we went to the academy. I mean, they notified my parents—they notified everyone's parents and all that—but that was pretty much it. It was all very official."

Olette nods, her pen arching and swooping across her paper. She continues to nod while she talks, never looking away from Riku, trying to keep him in check and focused with her stare. She says, "Okay. What was your experience at the academy like? As in… how did it differ from public school?"

"It was better, really. Cleaner. More... well funded, I guess. That part makes sense though, even if it seems off."

"Can you tell me—or just, I guess, _give_ me, really, a loose, pretty general idea of what it is you do here?"

"We think of ways people can harm the Syndicate and we use these ideas to form hypotheses so the Syndicate can make sure these things just don't happen. 'If an invasion occurred, forces would spread out to attack the island from all sides, ensuring no escape and no hope for reinforcements to be sent.' That sort of thing. Then we develop that into a thesis. We flesh it out, fill in the details, elaborate make-believe attack plans on the Destati Region. In some cases, we're pulled into more specific topics, such as planned assassinations or terrorist attacks."

Riku pauses here to take a breath, but pauses just half a moment longer than necessary. Olette isn't taking notes, he's noticing. No, she's simply staring straight at him, mentally taking in every single word he's saying, every gesture and emphasis on each and every syllable. At his pause, her intensity doesn't ebb away—she doesn't redirect it somewhere else to ease him into continuing. Rather, she leans just so slightly forward in her seat, says nothing and simply continues to implore him with her eyes. _Go on_—as if to say.

"Then…" He swallows. "We just… write up the essays. On these ideas. We base them off of lessons in psychology, sociology, and philosophy we picked up from the academy, primarily, but they also schooled us in naval warfare… Some air combat… But. Anyway. That's probably all just unimportant."

"Not at all."

"Are you writing all this down?"  
"No I'm listening. I'll get there eventually."

"…But you'll misquote me."

"I'm on your _side_, Riku. How many times do I have to say it? I'm not the bad guy." Olette gives Riku another moment or two to either chime in with any last thoughts or recollect himself. When he says nothing—instead opting to pick at a scratch on the surface of his desk with his fingernail—she pipes up again with another question. "Do you ever hesitate?" she asks.

"What?"

"Do you ever… feel wrong? Think twice about what you're doing?"

"…I don't really under—"

"It really doesn't _bother_ you, then, that you work for an organization—that you, well, pretty much _whore_ your mind off, really, to an organization that took over your country?"

"I… no."

Pausing from her scribbles, Olette's entire body stills completely, and stays so for all of a very brief half second before it breaks into motion again. Her head tilts up, she blinks once, twice, very slowly, and when she does speak, her words have the same slowness about them, too. "It doesn't?"

"No, I don't… get _bothered_. I mean. I do my job, that's what I—that's what I do. I'm not being disloyal or picking sides or anything like that."

Again, those eyes are telling him to keep talking, but Riku's figured them out by now, knows how they work, and knows that once he starts talking, whatever he says will probably fall out of hand and out of subconscious thought, so he catches himself before he can get going—he says nothing. He has Olette caught in a stalemate and it takes her only a few moments to realize it, and when she does she heaves a sigh and caps her pen. She knows he's censored from here on out because somewhere along the line she's gone and misstepped, gone and made him question her and her intentions.

"Can you show me the basement? I have an appointment there." At Riku's hesitancy, she waves one hand dismissively, the other hand busy tucking pens and paper pads back into her purse. She says, "I have clearance, if that's what you're worried about," and snaps her purse shut, gets up, moves towards the door, clearly waiting for Riku to lead the way.

_Clearance? For the basement? …There's a basement? _The hallway is deserted as ever and Riku really doesn't know why he's wishing someone would be out here, just once. Maybe the Squirrelly fellow could come to ship Olette off to wherever it is she needs to go to now, leaving Riku to go about his business—whatever that is, exactly. But with no one around, Olette is tapping her foot rather obnoxiously, Riku thinks, against the carpeted floor, purse cradled against her chest. Riku starts off in a random direction, making for the elevator, only to find that the elevator he rides up on in the mornings doesn't service the basement floor. He stares at the number display above the doors, wondering if they'll do him a terrific favor, just this once, and make possible the impossible. After half a minute of standing there and staring, it begins to seem unlikely.

And after half a minute of standing and staring, it's absolutely all Olette can do to keep from rolling her eyes dramatically as she points to the sign on the far end of the hall.

"Riku?"

'Lift to Basement Level' the sign proclaims. Above the narrow sliding door, there are only two floors listed—the number for the fourteenth floor—where they stand now—and a letter B for the basement level. Obscure. Random. Inconvenient. Riku can't imagine how he could have overlooked it before.

"Right. …That way."

The way Olette stands in the lift strikes Riku, for whatever reason, as being rather… _off_ somehow. The stance is one you would take in the produce aisle of the supermarket, pondering the benefits of potatoes over green beans, determining which is to appear on the evening's menu. It is not, however, the stance of one descending at a crawling 44 feet per minute into the pits of hell—which, Riku gathers, may very well be awaiting the two of them at their destination. But there she is, purse held in front of her, clasped hands, straight back and all.

x x x

The woman Olette has her "appointment" with inhabits a small, stark room, which is more a cubicle than a room, really. Aside from a no-nonsense wooden desk, wooden chair, and wooden cot, the woman occupies the room entirely by herself. From a distance, she can pass as being a rather healthy thirty or so, but as Olette and Riku press further into the room, door closing behind them, the woman ages rapidly with each advancing step, it seems. She's not at all unpleasant looking, Riku finds himself thinking with some mild shock. But her rich auburn hair has a faded look to it, like a thin layer of dust has fallen across her head and can't quite be wiped clean. Except for a ring of white locks stretching half-inch or so up from her scalp—rather reminding one of a halo of sorts—the only other signs of age are wrinkles in all the usual spots. There are crow's feet, deep and permanent—a line between her eyebrows and along her forehead—worry lines and creases on pale skin.

Olette smiles at her. Riku fixes his attention on the ground. He doesn't know why. The act just comes upon itself as a second nature. He fears the woman for no particular reason.

"Are you Naminé?" Olette asks the woman. The woman shakes her head.

"Have you seen her?" she replies. Her voice is surprisingly light and soft and comes out like a childish sigh.

"No, I'm sorry." Idly, Riku begins to wonder if the woman before them is annoyed that Olette seems to be talking down to her. She doesn't seem to be, though. She remains cool, calm, and collected as Olette crouches in front of her, says, "You must be Kairi, then."

"You're so observant." Riku can't help but grin just the smallest, tiniest bit. Perhaps she is annoyed after all.

"You're so polite," Olette counters. There's no malice in her voice, though, and Riku watches with some small degree of amazement as the woman—Kairi—musters up a small smile. Though it seems to be more for Olette's benefit than her own, there's still some humor there, and no trace of bitterness between the two women in the room at all. Olette tilts her head slightly, asking Kairi, "Can I talk to you a little while?"

"Who's your friend?" Kairi asks.

"Riku Okada. He's my escort for today."

"So he's not your friend," she clarifies.

"Not yet, no." Riku almost has to laugh at this, as if Olette possibly assumes that they will, one day, by some chance miracle, call one another friends. Unlikely. Pathetically unlikely. Kairi seems to pick up on it and simply studies Riku with a long and unabashed stare. And within that stare Riku finds the reason why he's so terrifically afraid of the woman. Like her speech, her gaze is still that of a child's. She feels no shame in staring because, Riku realizes, she has never been told that there _is_ shame in such a thing. When Kairi does look away, look back towards Olette, Riku is left staring at the side of her face, at the pale exposure of her neck before it disappears beneath the collar of her shirt. He can just catch a glimpse of a light red mark jetting across her flesh from the back of her neck, where it junctions with her shoulders.

The mark disappears behind a curtain of her hair as she moves slightly, so as better to address Olette.

"So. What can I tell you? They tell me if I cooperate, they'll bring her back," she says.

"Bring who back?"

"Naminé, of course."

"…How long have you been here, Kairi?"

"Longer than you've been alive." Kairi's eyes blink passively once, then take on a rather somber sheen to them, her mouth's empty smile seemingly spirited away in the span of a few split seconds, leaving in its place a sullen, tiny frown. "I'm sorry, Olette," she says sincerely. "I'm being rude. I don't try to be."

"Don't worry about it. Don't worry at all." Olette has on her pleasant smile again—maybe, Riku figures, that's where Kairi's has gone—up and lifted itself to Olette's younger, more immortal face—and she tells Kairi why she's there. The idea, the thesis, the D.R.S. Kairi wrinkles her nose upon mention of the Syndicate.

"I guess you work for them now?" she asks Riku.

"Not long. Just recently," he mumbles.

"Well. I'd be happy to talk to _you_," Kairi tells Olette. To Riku, however? She shifts her eyes to look at him, to address him, to say, "But you're going to have to leave."

Olette, for some bizarre reason, gets this look of mild offense on her face. She seems about to plead Riku's case—whether Riku actually has a case or not, he's not entirely sure—but it doesn't make much sense. "Kairi…"

"Hey, no, really. Fine by me. I'll be outside right here." Riku is already backing out, well aware of Kairi's fixed gaze on him, watching him retreat, watching him back off. Weird how the woman can apparently be some sort of prisoner and yet have enough power over her containment area to order those within about like it was her own twisted kingdom. Closing the door, Riku releases a breath he hadn't even been aware he'd been holding.

Kairi unnerves him to the very core, to say the absolute least. So he's glad when the door closes, glad when there's that barrier between them. He can't help but _be_ glad.

Now, there are countless questions Riku has milling about in his head right now that he's dying to ask. First and foremost among them, naturally, is: _"Why is there a mildly deranged, immature woman in the basement of my office building?"_ But he dutifully holds his tongue. Mostly, he holds his tongue because he doubts very much that he can pry an answer from a woman who won't even address anything of importance so long as he's in the room. He figures he can either ask Olette later or find out for himself. Somehow. No big deal.

And so he stands, in mock patience, outside the cell, fighting his own curiosity every step of the way to keep himself from pressing his ear to the frame or trying to peer under the door or through the tiny window to see what's going on. There's no one else on the floor, it seems, and indeed the basement is terribly small. Metal and vinyl tiles make up the hallway, which sits in a T-shape—the elevator at the base and one corridor connecting two doors. Behind one door, he knows, is Kairi—who, despite her questionable state of mind, seems rather harmless. But, leaning against the wall as he is, staring at the identical metal door at the opposite end of the hall, he can't help but wonder what pitiable little soul might sit behind that door, too. It could be the Naminé girl Kairi was babbling about, but that seems like too easy an out.

Riku swallows, saliva rolling down throat in a thick and heavy gulp and he's forgotten, up until this point, just how much he hates basements. There's something wrong with the idea of being underground and alive. The underground is a place for the dead—it always has been, and by all rights as far as Riku's concerned, it always should be. Venturing into anything situated beneath the earth is like intruding on the homes of the dead. And though Riku isn't a superstitious individual at all, he feels the prickles begin to touch and trail up his spine, a fear akin to some kind of claustrophobia, though he doesn't know the scientific name for the thing.

He tries to get his mind away from the underworld by distracting himself, and by distracting himself he ends up drumming his fingers against the wall, reciting the names of all the most well-known Greek philosophers and their most well-known publications, and then—when that is not enough—by theorizing in his own work-riddled head just _why_ exactly Kairi is in the basement. He goes through any number of explanations—live-in janitor (the one who turns off the lights for him, perhaps), D.R.S. employee stoned out on some drug (unfit and insecure to be re-released into the world), and even the long lost sister of his superior (lesser and locked away because she was female, or because she was, secretly, _better_?)

Of course, Riku doesn't believe any of his theories to be true. It's this exact fact that makes him smart, mind you. Nonetheless, he stands and waits outside the cell for what feels like an eternity, and really, it is quite a stupidly long time. Almost two hours pass before the door moves one inch, pauses, and then opens all the way, Olette bidding farewell to Kairi—"Until next time!"—as she heads out into the real world, into the waiting gaze of Riku, who has had to use the bathroom for the past twenty minutes.

"Thanks for waiting, Riku," she says.

He stares blankly at her, waiting for an explanation, waiting for anything, really, and all she gives—after a moment of awkward silence and indifference—is a fake smile. Clearly, Kairi's words didn't exactly cast the D.R.S. in the best light. Not that Riku expected them to. He imagines that being stored in a basement for who knows how long just wouldn't paint a good picture for much of anyone.

In the elevator, Riku casually crosses his legs in front of him, leaning against the chilling metal wall and asking, "So. What'd she have to say?"

Olette almost has a caught-in-the-headlights look about her, but it passes quickly as ever. In its place, she wears a small, secretive little smile—genuine in all forms—and she says, "You should try talking to her instead of asking me."

"You heard her. She won't talk to me," Riku says.

"Maybe…" Olette trails off. Shrugs her shoulders. "I just feel like she has too much to say—just for one person to listen." As though realizing she's babbling a tad incoherently, she shoots Riku an apologetic look, and when she does it a heavy strand of hair slides down off her shoulder and hangs limply in front of her. She says, "I'm sorry… you're angry, aren't you? I tried to tell her you were okay, but she didn't—"

"Look, I can't blame her, alright? You don't even know I _am_ okay, that I'm not some mindless D.R.S. drone, so _duh_, she doesn't believe you."

"Well first of all, you're wrong about that. I _do_ know you're a mindless drone. And second of all, even if you are all… stupid and drone-like, it doesn't mean you're a bad guy."

"I'm here because I'm smart. Don't tell me I'm stupid."

The elevator chimes delightedly as it returns to the fourteenth floor, doors sliding open. As the two step out into the hall, Olette takes her time in responding to Riku, calculating the time and pause of each word and breath, so when she speaks she's clear and painfully poignant in a way Riku finds himself only wishing he could be.

"_Correction_, Riku," she tells him. "You're here because no one felt inclined to tell you how to beat the system. That doesn't make you smart. That makes you oblivious and rather conceited. But don't worry. I still think you're a good guy in the end. So have a nice day. I'll be seeing you tomorrow."

And because of poignancy and precision, Riku can't really bring himself to muster up a half-assed comeback until Olette is already descending the main elevator on her own, far away from Riku's snappy curses and pathetic excuses—none of which he actually utters, for his superior's squirrel-man is in the hall again, looking at him as if to ask him where he is, what he's doing, and why he's doing it. Having no answers to any of these unasked questions, Riku returns to his office, takes hold of his coat and briefcase, and goes home.

x x x

Riku doesn't know how Sora's presence in his life has suddenly become so fixed a thing. If Sora isn't in Riku's home when Riku arrives after work, Riku puts down his briefcase, puts on a change of clothes and heads back downtown to Sora's tower. For if Sora isn't at Riku's that's where Sora is—sky-high with a countless-watt beam of light and the night and not much else. It's routine, somehow, but a varied routine at that. Sora has developed a small closet of clothing under Riku's bed and Riku has a spare change of work and casual clothes hanging in the far reaches of Sora's cubby closet. How the hell these things got where they are—that remains a mystery, but there they stay until a rare day when either man or boy might need them. But they'll always be cleaned and replaced in the same secret way.

Sora now sits beside Riku, the two of them having just talked themselves into a silence, lost in the air of the night. It's the only time they really see each other, and the effect is evident by the bags under Riku's normally alert and focused eyes. But he doesn't mind and Sora certainly doesn't either. Night owls, the both of them, and it is not at all uncommon for one of them—once the eleven p.m. mark rolls in—to pull out a book from wherever they might have hidden it on their pleasant person and start reading, for no conversation lasts forever and neither is very much adverse to reading at all.

Tonight Sora has, beside him, a dog-eared copy of what appears to be some morbid hardback thriller from the library, gruesomely entitled:

"**AND THE WATERS TURNED TO BLOOD**."

"Well, that looks foreboding," Riku says when Sora moves, making a grab for the thing once their talk has eased itself into a soft and steady silence.

"It's not, really," Sora tells him. "It's actually really interesting."

"It is?"

"It's about Pfiesteria."

"...It's about what now?"

"They're a type of little tiny cells that attack things in the water. They lay in hiding beneath the surface, and then when fish go by—_WHAM_! They strike! And leave bloody, lesion-covered dead fish in their wake."

"…That's actually really terrifying, you know."

"I _know_."

"Since when are you into… tiny cells?"

"I dunno. Since a long time, I guess." And then Sora goes and asks a question that makes his ears turn pink with embarrassment just as soon as the words roll on out of his mouth. "What are you into?" Strawberry ears, just like that.

But what Sora doesn't catch on to—probably because he's too flustered with his own sad self to notice—is that Riku's ears do the exact same thing. Not because Riku is embarrassed for Sora's classless way of speaking, but because Riku is actually really quite embarrassed for Riku and Riku alone. Sora asking Riku what his hobbies are is very much like a happily employed individual asking an unemployed fellow what he does for a living. The answer in both cases is a very pathetic, very resounding 'nothing,' but because 'nothing' sounds absolutely god-awful, both Riku and the jobless person of hypothetical persuasions here might be moved towards bullshitting their way out of an answer. Which is exactly what Riku proceeds to do.

He shrugs his shoulders so slowly and one hand comes up to brush aside the topic, and were we not to know any better, it might even appear to us, of all observers, that Riku truly doesn't give a damn. "Whatever," he goes. "I don't really know," he says. "I mean. A _lot_ of things. I know about a lot of things and a lot of things are interesting, but I'm not _passionate_ or anything. Not about subjects or topics or… anything in particular."

"I doubt that," Sora says.

"Why?"

"You're just…" And then Sora says nothing, because what Sora finds himself about to say is truly even more humiliating than his immature 'SO WHAT ARE YOU INTO?' blunder of moments ago.

"Sora?"

"You're just a passionate person, is all." The strawberry effect has spread from Sora's ears (which now might as well be set on fire) to his cheeks, and he suddenly seems very interested in his left pinky finger, splayed out with all his other fingers across the cover of _And the Waters Turned to Blood_.

"Hah. Right. Listen, Sora. I'm nineteen. You don't really—"

"_Know_ you? Know the _nineteen_-year-old you? But I _feel_ like I do," Sora says quietly. "Don't you feel like you know me, too? And… I don't just mean the eleven-year-old me, you know."

"If I didn't, I wouldn't be here."

"Then here we are, back at square one." Sora's fingers roll against the cover of the book and he lets out a sigh. "Just us and the flagellates," he says.

And Riku, from the corner of his eye, sees a Sora brand new to him, staring off after the spotlight and it's pointless beam of light. Riku sees a Sora lost in his thoughts, and Riku, in this moment, couldn't possibly see a Sora he could ever care about more. Losing yourself in your own mind is one of the bravest and most daring things Riku thinks people are capable of doing. Not enough people do it anymore. This, Riku has decided, over many years of thought-wandering, is essentially why everyone but him seems completely stupid. But here is Sora. Supposedly simple Sora, deep in thought, so deep that Riku is almost dead certain that were he to look into Sora's eyes at this moment from the right angle, he would see whatever dimension or plane the human mind exists in—he'd see Sora chatting it up and out with whatever inner beasts—friendly or not—he may have on his plate.

And it is precisely all this that moves Riku to pretty much confess what he's feeling to Sora, in a far less eloquent and far less specific way than that which probably should be used.

"You really are fucking brilliant."

Sora laughs, then sees that Riku actually means it, and is completely thrown for a loop. And then, because he hates how he always seems to wind up looking like a confused ass in front of Riku, he makes a feeble attempt at turning the whole damn thing into one joke. "Look alive, Riku," he says. "You've met your intellectual _ri-val_."

"I should turn you in. Go to my boss, tell him, 'HEY, you missed one!'"

"Do it, I dare you."

"I'll grab you by your arm like this—" and Riku does just so, hauling Sora to his feet with ease, with a laugh, "—point you out for every stupid asshole in this stupid city to see and I'll tell them I've found the next goddamn _genius_ that can rip this place down in one blindingly brilliant breath."

Riku's grinning like an idiot and the light from the spotlight plays off his face and makes the shadows of that grin almost maddening, almost manic. Giddy with some crazed intellectual high, Riku spins away from Sora. He finds himself by the spotlight, takes hold of the thing and gives it a spin, watching as the bulb flashes and twirls before his eyes and makes the night look like a battleground flashing above with bombs and fire. And out of worry for the probably-expensive equipment or out of sheer confusion as to Riku's sudden, drastic change in disposition, Sora calls out Riku's name. And maybe he means to say something after that_—"What are you doing?" "Are you okay?" "Are you nuts, man?"_—but whatever it might have been goes unsaid, because Sora forgets entirely why he wanted to call out Riku's name in the first place.

"…Sora?"

And then it hits him. The spotlight is still revolving slowly, eerily, spinning it its place, making Riku's face light then dark, then light again with each revolution. "…Do you really mean all that stuff?" Sora asks him.

"Of course. And why not? This spotlight—on you." Riku takes hold of the light one final time, and slowly his spins it, guides its beam down and frontward, illuminating Sora's entire body with it. Sora's shadow becomes a thing to be reckoned with, shooting out behind him with all the power and force with which the light illuminates him, and Riku thinks for a moment that there must be meaning in that, too, with such a balance to exist in a world like this.

"I love you."

Sora spits out the words like they're something sour, and the tone of it is what catches Riku off guard. Not so much the words or their meaning—he knows how Sora felt once, and it doesn't come as such a shock that he, being _Sora_, would still feel that way, even now. But Sora recoils at his own words after he's gone and said them, the corners of his mouth drawing themselves together, his eyes nailing themselves to the floor and refusing to budge, even when Riku says his name once, then once more still.

And so, however awkwardly, Riku takes two steps forward, covering all the distance between the two of them. He lifts his arms, hesitates for just the slightest moment, and then pulls Sora into a loose hug, the boy's head coming to rest beneath his chin effortlessly. His fingers find their way to the base of Sora's skull, where they busy themselves twining in and through the strands they find there, playing up against Sora's scalp and skin.

"So tell me about these killer oceanic cells," Riku says, talking into Sora's unruly mane of hair that seems to keep trying to crawl into his eyes and nose.

"They're a type of Dinoflagellate," Sora mumbles. "Flagellates, like—"

"I know what a flagellate is."

"Funny little cells with long little hairs."

"Yeah."

"Dinoflagellates cause things like algae blooms. Red tides. Bad things. Paralytic shellfish poisoning, amnesic shellfish poisoning, neurotoxin shellfish poisoning, diarrhetic shellfish poisoning. All sorts of terrible things." Sora pauses, wondering if he should go on, or if he just sounds like an idiot and should give up on it. But Riku's fingers are still in motion throughout his hair, and beneath his hand, Riku's heartbeat—Sora swears—speeds up just slightly. Thinking this through, this realization, Sora loses his train of thought. So he concludes by saying lamely, by saying quite simply: "People die."

"How?"

"Coastal kids. You remember Wakka?"

"Yeah."

"His mom went crazy and died from eating too many poisoned shellfish."

"Wow."

"Yeah." Palms flat against Riku's chest, Sora pushes away—and then Riku's heartbeat becomes a real and certain physical pulse beneath his hand and Sora can't be anything but dead sure that he didn't imagine the speed, that he didn't imagine the change in Riku's lifebeat. Sora studies Riku's face, so impassive that it'd never give anything away. The only thing there written in plain view is Riku's unasked question as to Sora's movement away, as to what had been so wrong with his hug. Sora just smiles, reassured by this somehow, and says to Riku, "It's cold. Can we go inside?"

Riku nods dumbly, blankly, and Sora takes him by the hand to his little makeshift residence atop the building. It is, as far as Riku can tell, an old observational deck with its own separate stairway leading down to floors below. The stairway Sora's gone and boarded up, tacking up blankets over its build and throwing pillows and bean bags into the floor's indent where stairs leading down should be. More sheets are tacked around the windows, two mattresses stacked one atop the other situation in the dead center of the room, with all the evidence of Sora's little life littered around whatever space remains. Clothing falls out of the little closet nook, which, according to Sora, had once held radio equipment way back in the day when people actually used things like radios for communicating. Books and crates and more clothes lie scattered across the floor, and by the windowsill is row upon row of colored bottles, which—were it light outside—Riku assumes would make the place glow a thousand different shades of red and green and blue.

Without another word, Sora lies down on his bed. And, not wanting to question, not wanting to offend, Riku mimics the motion. They lie face to face in the dark, neither thinking (but both certainly realizing) that the room they're now in is just as cold as the night air had been outside. Sora licks his lips. "So tell me," he says, "a happy story now. Something that's happened to you since we apparently knew each other."

"So this one day at the academy," Riku begins, not entirely certain of where the words are coming from, "they had us line up. They told us we'd draw numbers, that we'd have to go in order, one by one, and give a speech on how, you know, how the Syndicate had changed our lives and the country's lives and all that. Each of us went up there, took our turns waxing poetic on the whole stupid thing, and then this one guy stands up. I didn't know his name, but I did know I'd had classes with him before. He goes up there and he takes this big breath—lets it out, stares us all down. There were at least sixty of us—maybe more, all crammed in that room. But I swear that kid looked each and every one of us in the eye. And after a moment, some instructor spoke up, told him to get on with it, to say his piece. … So he did.

"He very calmly, very politely told us all that we were, each of us, frauds and scum and liars—the lowest of the low. We'd betrayed our country, he'd said, and we deserved to die for it, for what we'd done, for how weak we were, some lapdogs of some higher power we'd never even thought to question. I don't know how he managed to get out all he did before they grabbed him. I guess all of us, even the instructors, were too stunned to move."

"…What happened to him?" Sora asks. Riku can tell he's scooted closer, and he doubts it was because the story was particularly creepy or anything.

"I don't really know," he says.

"…Can you quit your job?"

"I don't think so."

"So that's it? That's the brightest, most uplifting story you've got to tell me?"

"I've told you all my happy stories."

"No, you only ever tell me miserable ones. Hopeless ones."

x x x

"_A long time ago no one was ever lonely because all people, back then, looked like giant round balls with four arms, four legs, and two heads—all placed back to back and sewn together into one huge, happy person. People weren't just girls and just boys then, either. _

"_There were three kinds of people, and they called themselves the children of the sun, the children of the moon, and the children of the earth. _

"_The children of the earth looked like two girls back to back, and they cared about each other very much and always shared their thoughts and secrets with each other. The children of the moon were boys and girls that were together—just like their sisters—back to back. They, too, were happy with their other halves and would never mind just going off into the woods alone to sit and talk with each other, because even though they were always together, they always had things to talk about and think about. And the children of the sun—they were two boys, fashioned like the others and just as perfect and whole and happy as them, too. They would play games and tell jokes and laugh all day, and at night they would tell stories to one another until they both fell asleep at the exact same time. They were all happy—all of them, because whenever they felt sad or alone, all they had to do was talk or cry and their other half was always there to make everything okay again. _

"_The thing is, happiness makes people strong, and when all the gods of the long-ago world saw how strong the people were becoming, they started to worry that people might become even stronger than them—stronger than the gods themselves. The gods didn't know what to do to protect themselves. _

"_But they came up with an idea they thought would work. _

"_The gods summoned a huge thunderstorm that covered the entire Earth and all the people of the world stood and stared in awe and fear, and they became even more afraid as they started to hear thunder—louder than any thunder they'd ever heard before. They began to run, to try and find a shelter, a refuge from the storm, but they couldn't escape it—not a single one of them. Lightning started to shoot from the sky, and it struck all of the people who cried in their fear and pain. The lightning cut them straight in half and tore them all in two. It made them all of bodies holding two legs, two arms, one head, and one heart, and the gods flew down from the heavens when the storm ended. _

"_They stitched up the wounds of the people and pulled the skin around to their fronts, tying it a knot on their bellies so they would always remember the price of their happiness in the eyes of the gods, the pain of their loss and the split of their bodies in two. But when they had gone, the people still cried. Who would they talk to now? Who would they care for now that they'd been carved in half? _

"_For years and years, all the people of the world searched and searched for their other halves. And each and every time they thought they'd found them, they'd push their bodies together to try and make themselves into one beautiful person again. But they never could. And we still can't. None of us will ever be able to fit back together like that again. So we'll always be alone. We'll always be incomplete. But the desire we have to be whole again—that's what we call love. That's the force that pulls people together to try and feel that completeness again. And it's the most powerful force there is, because when we're whole, we're happy, and our happiness makes us strong."_

"_That's terrible."_

"_What?"_

"_What a terrible story, Riku! Why would you tell me something like that?!"_

"_I didn't mean to… Sora, don't cry like that."_

"_Well how am I __**supposed**__ to cry?"_

_Riku had held out his arms in answer—__**Like this**__, he'd thought, and Sora had rolled toward them and cried there. He didn't cry for very long, for few boys at such an awkward age give themselves enough leave to cry as much as they should. But when he'd finished, he was still wrapped within the other boy's hold, his head tucked beneath his chin, his fingers playing up against his collarbone where the skin was so pale and soft. He leaned in then, to kiss where Riku had once kissed him—the very corner of the mouth, the farthest reaches of the lips there that never get a hint of attention, the tickle of the kiss enough to make anyone, even Riku, crack a smile._

"_Riku?" Sora asked._

"_Yeah?"_

"_Is the story true?"_

"_As true as any other story."_

"_Are we trying to force ourselves back together? Right now? Like this?"_

"_No…"_

"_How do we try?"_

x x x

Riku leaves Sora's place well before the boy has any chance of waking up. When he'd awoken earlier in the morning, Sora had been pressed up against the front of him, his breath coming in soft and steady puffs of heat against Riku's chest, his fingertips grazing the cotton of his t-shirt. And when Riku had slid from the covers, he'd seen Sora's frown, his brows drawn together in hopeless thought and wonderment—_Where could the heat have gone to?—_still muddled in sleep.

The thing about it all is that Riku can still bring to mind every slight, petty detail—each and every breath, sound, pulse of heat and air—that happened all those years ago. All those years ago when he'd been with Sora in a way that was painfully foreign and yet painfully familiar for both of them. He can call to mind the sounds that came from Sora's mouth—good or bad, regardless—the warmth that radiated from his skin, the taste of his tongue and lips and the expression of his face—more than anything can he call to mind that face in the here and now. He can still see traces of that face on Sora to date, in just the fraction of a second in which Sora's brain is not connecting, not protecting, not screening every emotion, even flicker of eyes and muscle. The old Sora is still there. He hasn't changed. And Riku is certain that the old Sora can call to memory the event with all the clarity Riku himself can.

"_You're just a passionate person, is all,"_ Riku had heard Sora say to him just the night before. Only now does he come to realize that what Sora meant by those words was: _You __**are**__ a passionate person—I've __**seen**__ you be a passionate person—I've seen you be as passionate as any person of any age, living or dead, could possibly be. Drop the act now while you're ahead, because you're not fooling me, and I'm the only person that matters enough to fool._

He now sits at his desk, head down, feet flat on the coffee stain of yesterday, and he feels the tremendous weight of Everything Done Before bearing down upon his back-- which he'd never really thought of as fragile at all, up until now. Up until invisible pressure and misdeeds of long ago have pulled loose, broken free, and jump on the bandwagon of Riku's daily miseries. Behind his closed lids lurks Sora's sleeping face, and deep somewhere in the recesses of his mind lurk all the things he's been meaning to say to Sora since seeing him again, all of them still unsaid, all of them still just thought. He worries that that's what they'll stay as. That they'll never be said. Because he can't bring himself to decide right from wrong anymore—the two have gone and tied themselves so up in one another that to try and untangle them and to make sense of either would require more time and more energy than Riku has it in him to spare.

And that's a rotten thought, it is, that Riku is too "busy" with work to figure out his stance on good and evil.

"Good morning, Riku!"

He rolls his head to one side. Olette is in the doorway, and somewhere in her standard pin-up smile is a trace of concern that Riku wishes he could cling to. Instead he just clears his throat, sits up, fixes his hair, and says, "Morning."

"Hey, listen. We really got off on the wrong foot last time."

"…We didn't get off on any foot. We face-planted."

Olette smiles. One-hundred-percent genuine. "I didn't mean to get like that on you," she says. "I'm really not some evil, wicked demon-woman, really. I'm just a girl trying to write a thesis. And I really, _really_ would like it if you'd help me." "Come on, Riku. I know you're not in line with these jerks here."

"That doesn't mean I'm in line with you."

"But it doesn't mean you're _not_."

For a moment, Riku seriously considers tuning her out—if possible—and returning to the muck of his own private thoughts.

"Don't you have to go interview people with petty, meaningless questions or something?"

"You're absolutely right! And what, sir, is your favorite color?"

"Haha, funny."

"I'm serious. What is it?"

"I don't have a favorite color."

"I'm just trying to be friendly."

"And I'm just trying to do my job."

Olette sighs at this, one hand on her hip, the other holding that purse of hers. Because she's still standing and hasn't taken her seat opposite of Riku, he thinks he might have a shot of getting rid of her. So long as no one's comfortable, what harm is there, really, in just ushering them out the door? Surely, he thinks, he could probably fake an aneurism or some other medical emergency, send her running for aid, and then slip out through the elevator when she's gone. If all else fails, he decides, that's his backup plan. But he never gets the chance to put it into action—brilliant thing it is—because Olette tells him she needs him to take her down to the basement again. He asks her why she needs him—all he does is wait around down there, after all—but she simply insists.

"It's _your_ company policy," she says. "Don't you know? I'd go by myself if I could, but I can't, and that's just how it is. So you're up."

They trek the old path towards the designated basement lift, ride it down for minutes on end, neither talking, both apparently lost in their own thoughts. Upon realizing this, Riku can't help but wonder at what thoughts Olette could possibly have to be lost in. He doubts very much that they're as murky and muddled as his own, but at the same time he gets the distinct impression that the more he keeps underestimating the girl, the more likely it is that all his assumptions and all his inferences are likely to come back in the near future and royally bite him in the ass. So he calms himself down, gets a grip on his bitterness, calls to mind Sora and the dilemma at hand with regards to him. Whether he is right or wrong, whether Sora is truly persistent and naïve enough to believe the perfect best in Riku and to keep hounding after him for attention he knows Riku is bound to give in the end.

The only thing to snap Riku out of his mental escapades is a sharp intake of break from Olette, across from Kairi like she was the previous day. This time, however, her voice has lost its sickeningly sweet coo and takes on an edge Riku hasn't heard before—from Olette or anyone else. She's cradling Kairi's arms, one in each hand, and Riku stands in the doorway, halfway on his way to being out, but stopped by that voice and by Olette's words, her hissed exclamation, her: "Kairi?! What is this?"

"I don't really know," he hears her reply.

"Did you do this to yourself?"

"Of course not."

"What happened?"

"I don't really know," she says again. Riku still stands stupid in the doorway, metal handle cold and clammy against his palm. "Are you here to listen more?" he hears her ask.

"Yes, I just…"

What happens now is probably important. Later, perhaps, much later in the safety of his home or the quiet of some isolated somewhere, Riku might think back on this moment and be aware of its importance. For now, his observations are simply that and that alone. Mere observations. He catches sight of parallel scars running from elbow to wrist along the insides of Kairi's arms—two on each arm, two perfectly straight, perfectly, evenly spaced. He catches sight of her vacant eyes, her confused and startled expression as she's blown away a bit by Olette's concern, so overpowering that it might even have been potent enough to blow Riku himself away, had he been on the receiving end of such a thing. Yet finally, his eyes take in the room again, and do so without straying from Kairi's slender frame, for he's seen the room before, he knows its contents, he's committed them to memory.

And he's near dead certain that no one can inflict that sort of bodily harm on themselves using bulky wooden furniture that's nailed to the ground.

His hearing makes a slow return—he hadn't even noticed it'd gone off like that—and he can make out Olette pressing further still into business not her own, still holding onto Kairi, still making the world of the strange woman in the forgotten basement level of Riku's office. It's surreal in a way Riku doesn't want to acknowledge, because acknowledging surrealism generally leads to a slip of realism, and were realism to fail him, Riku would be at a loss. For with realism comes rationality, and rationality is, quite tragically, all that Riku seems to know.

"Are you okay? I don't have to talk to you today if you don't want. It…"

"No. I like talking to you." Kairi catches sight of Riku over Olette's shoulder. "Are you staying here?" she asks him.

"I… No. No, I'll… be outside."

"I was telling you about Naminé, wasn't I?"

"…Yeah…"

"I've known her forever. And I don't just mean since childhood. I told you yesterday. I don't think you understood. And even if I were to tell you again today, I still don't think you'd understand. Because you see, the thing about it is that I think everyone feels this way initially, even though they don't know it. It's a feeling we can't recognize until we can sense it's gone. But from the beginning, we're all very, painfully lonely. And there's no escaping that loneliness. Naminé got rid of it. With Naminé it's different. It's what I'm trying to explain to you. Because maybe, I feel, it's going to be very important. With Naminé, I feel like… Naminé is—"

From across the room, from the door ajar, Riku makes as though he's leaving, back towards the two women. But he hears Kairi's hushed and excited words, and he knows, he feels, what she is about to say before she comes out and says it. He feels her words on his tongue before they burst from her mouth and to his ears, and as she speaks them, he moves his lips to form them—those identical words.

"Naminé is…"

"'_Like my other half.'_

"'_I would do anything for her.'_

"'_And she would do anything for me.'_

"'_A thousand, __**thousand**__ times over.'"_

(x) (x) (x)

Well, I definitely wasn't expecting people to, uh, actually _ask_ for that cranberry bread recipe I jokingly babbled about at the end of the last chapter. But for the very small few of you who did ask about it, therrre it is, on my profile page.

Oh. And yes. Kairi is about fifty-seven _at this particular moment in time_. What a trip.


	4. The Empty Threats of Little Lord

**Like I Killed The Giants**

'The Empty Threats of Little Lord'

Notice of the wall begins to surface the next week. It starts in the bowels of the city—the underlings of this and that taking note, asking questions, slurring words, talking dark. They live—these kinds of people—back in the forgotten rim of the downtown district, which is now not so much a downtown district as it is a small, unusually quiet slum. But the wall is there now, surrounding the city on four sides, and a certain unease begins to fall over everyone. Even those "upstanding" enough to think themselves on the good side of the law begin to worry. _What have I done, what has my family done, what have we all done this time around? _

It is a humdrum Thursday of any ordinary nature, otherwise. Riku is outside a metal door within the depths of the office basement, which he's beginning to think will be his death spot—he spends so much of his damn time there nowadays. Sora is atop his roof. He's been watching the trucks and cranes and security as their devices and operators scuttle around the city floor, and he notices that unease that pulses from those below like a wave of sickness, a ripple of dark, tense heat.

Perhaps it's the wave that draws Sora up and out and down to the city below. He has some sort of crackpot excuse for going. Wanting a cheap, crappy fast-food sandwich or some such thing, which he instantly forgets about as soon as he leaves his rooftop perch. His feet know where they're going, and in a sense his brain probably does, too, though he'd rather not admit to himself that he's foolish enough to venture headlong into what is—in all likliehood—a rather dangerous setting.

When he comes within sight of his destination, even Sora—sweet, high-spirited, the-world-and-mankind-have-no-limits Sora—has to stop and stare and wonder at how the hell anyone in their right mind could build something quite so monstrous. From a distance, the wall stands powerful and jet black. Sora can't tell what it's made of, but the creative side of himself (and the side well hidden in the depths of his nearly-adult body) wants to guess and say it's made of 100 concentrated evil—a substance he's sure he's heard about in a movie somewhere before.

His fingers feel warm on the wall, which is chill and slick with moisture from the morning's fog now gone. It makes it easy for him to trail one hand alongside him, against the stone, as he walks beside it. There are no jags Sora can feel in its construction. They're not bricks stacked and towered atop each other, but one impossibly huge, impossibly solid mass of a thing he still can't identify—giant slabs of solid dark that connect and surround the capital. He doesn't intend to walk the entire perimeter of the city in one day—even though the Destati region is small, its capital city is nothing to scoff at, really—but it's with some subconscious pull that he finds himself walking, one hand on the wall, for hours.

"You there! What're you doing?"

The shout comes long after Sora's lost himself around the city's edge, and he opens his eyes he hadn't noticed he'd shut.

"I'm walking," he says.

"Well, get off the wall!"

"I'm not on the wall."

Footsteps come from behind—only one man, Sora can tell, which instantly puts him at ease. The man is tall, but not overpowering—assertive, but not really threatening. He's the type, Sora figures, that blows smoke without fire, and for that reason alone, his anger makes Sora want to smile just a little. The ever so slight twitch of his mouth brings the man into a scowl and draws him to his full height, which is taller than Sora'd originally thought.

"I've got my eye on you," the man grumbles. He stands there a moment, as if he's waiting for Sora to scuttle away or say something stupid enough to warrant a merciless beating, but Sora does neither. "Come on, move out if you're moving. If not, you're gonna get trouble."

"Can you tell me why they built this?" Sora asks him.

"For your own safety kid, now move along." The man taps his foot and Sora figures it's probably in his best interest to listen, as he usually does, and retreat. He begins to move to do so, some of the tension in the air begins to disperse, but then something stops him. He turns back.

"Why aren't we safe?" he asks.

"Look, do you think I have all day to spend talking to you? Go on, look at yourself. You're not worth my time."

Just as Sora's eyes begin to narrow and his mouth begins to scowl, there comes a very faint and very quiet sound that strangely has the power to completely derail the confrontation at hand. It comes from above, and for a moment Sora thinks it must be birds, and when he realizes there are no birds, he thinks it must be God—for whatever reason. And when he realizes that there is no parting of the clouds and no divine deliverance of the moment, Sora looks up and sees hundreds—thousands—of papers pouring down from the sky like snow or feathers or both rendered larger and louder, and yet not very loud at that.

A paper falls at his feet. Others follow it. Sora picks it up, paper still raining all around. It reads:

**FORCE AGAINST FORCE. **

_RESIST! _

_Radia Corps Can Help!_

"Goddammit. Hey! Put that down, would ya? And beat it already! Shit. Hey, yeah, Cid in. We got some shit to deal with on the southwest wall. Yeah, by the goddamn gate—why aren't you fuckers doin' anything about it yet, huh? Tell me that, why dontcha. Well _get_ on it! Take those bastards down and question the motherfuckin' _hell_ outta them!" The man, otherwise preoccupied with hollering orders into his phone, only looks up when he notices that Sora's starting to inch away. "And you ca—HEY, you dumb brat, get the hell back here!"

Now one thing you have to understand is that Sora has never disobeyed a major figure of authority before in his life. He doesn't know it now, but sidestepping the orders of this Cid fellow will be only the first in a long series of civil disobediences for Sora. But, as of this particular moment in time, Sora is still rather unrehearsed in the avoidance of the law. So he's moved by natural instinct and, as natural instinct dictates, he runs.

Of course, inexperienced as he is, his mad start to a sprint only results in him sliding on the slick pavement and tumbling, skidding across the ground, chin a bloody mess now and palms scratched to pieces, though he's still got ahold of that paper. Cid curses something awful behind him and Sora half rolls, half scrambles to his feet, leaping upwards with a triumphant sort of gasp before promptly being bowled over yet again by a flailing, beefy arm of the man behind him. The pain this time around is almost enough to bring tears to Sora's eyes, but he has them wide open, wide and revealing Cid's outreached hand, going for his paper that _he_ found and which, by all rights good and equal, is now _his_. Bringing his elbow back into the man's gut, it's really just that simple. Sora is free, and Sora's away, bolting for all he's worth down an alleyway, running from the wall.

Cid's shouting behind him again, though Sora dare not chance a look back to know if he's speaking to others around or hollering into that damned phone of his. Sora's never been much for long distance, he knows it better than anyone, and no matter how far he stretches his legs and how much he paces his breath, he's winded and tired some blocks from the wall in a part of town he's never been to before and can still hear Cid in pursuit. They're in the old part of town, the southern part of town, where the river that runs through it doesn't run as fast and its water are slow and sluggish like the people who now live down there, where so few go. Ahead is a bridge, and in a moment's stroke of genius, Sora actually manages to weave a plan into being.

He looks behind him—no Cid in sight, though he instantly regrets the look back because the water's edge comes up faster than he'd expected, and by the time he looks frontward again, he's airborn with a downward trend of motion that leaves him landing face first in the mud of the narrow river bottom, surfacing and choking with water and confusion. He tries to shut himself up, tries to smother the coughs and hacks and take refuge beneath the bridge. Footsteps and curses come closer—they're one in the same. The bridge above is old and nearly rotted—some construction from long ago made of wood and stone. Sora can see through the gaps in the planking, and he sees Cid stop, pause, stand directly above him, and Sora being Sora, Sora knows that Cid stops now because he knows something is not quite right, and he knows it as deep as his bones.

But either Cid doesn't make much of such senses and intuition or Sora was wrong to begin with, for Cid starts back the way he came, trail of expletives in his wake and not much else aside from silence.

Sora swallows, though he thinks the threat is gone. He tries to shift his weight because his arms are up to his wrists in muck and mud from where he's started to sink into the area by the riverside. But upon freeing his hand, there's not just mud and dirt rolling away, but a catch of something white and hard that he sees for just a moment before it falls into the water. Fishing after it, Sora spends a few moments splashing stupidly around before clasping it in his hand once more and pulling it free.

_It looks like a fossil_, he thinks. And ever so like a child still, he goes off to show Riku his outstanding discovery—oblivious to the fact that the flyer he'd held in his hand before is now being swept along out of Destati, carried in the river water.

x x x

Olette arrives late that afternoon blaming an A.M. exam and an off-kilter bus schedule. So Riku serves the last two hours of his workday bored in the basement, waiting as usual. Kairi has either taken a sudden interest in him or has developed some bizarre form of pity for his character, because for whatever reason, she invites him to stay. Yet something tells him not to. Were he to remain in that room, he would be intruding on something—though what exactly it is he'd be intruding on, he isn't quite sure. When Olette finally does come out, she checks her watch, begs another hour of Riku's time with questions and conversation.

"I'll buy you a cup of coffee," she tells him in the elevator. "There's a café right outside."

"I know there's a café there," he mutters. "I **do** work here and all."

When he seems content to just leave it at that and retreat into his office (with plans to hide out there until he's sure Olette is gone), she just presses harder. "Please," she insists. "Please. I just want to talk."

"All you ever want to do is talk," Riku says, rolling his eyes and busying himself as his desk, like he's important. Like his desk is important. And really, he means his words to be taken as an annoyed jab and nothing more—a little prick to the skin of Olette and her misplaced effort. What he doesn't expect is for her two fists to come slamming down on his desk, sending pens flying and papers drifting to the floor.

"Maybe," she hisses, "_maybe_ I talk because I can't do anything else. _Maybe_ I talk because I can't take action. Has that ever occurred to you? I _hate_ this and I want it to end, but I can't do anything real about it. Has that _ever_ occurred to you?"

"No," Riku answers truthfully, if somewhat stupidly.

Nonetheless, fifteen minutes later, he's just outside the office, at the oddball hole-in-the-wall café next door. For all that Olette had momentarily lost her feminine cool some thirteen floors above them, she's calmed down considerably now—and rather disturbingly so, brooding over her cup of tea instead of doing the talking she'd so strongly insisted upon. After a few minutes of painful, awkward silence, Olette tells him however strangely, "I feel responsible for all of this somehow."

And Riku can't tell if she's talking about Kairi or the D.R.S. or his ridiculously crappy work-life, but even if she spoke of any of those, he still couldn't understand how she could possibly think backwards enough to pin the blame on herself. So he fiddles with the styrafoam cup in hand, pulls off its safety lid, and goes about holding his hands over the gentle curls of steam rising from his coffee. Olette watches him the entire time, maybe waiting for a response, maybe not. Either way, Riku gives her a predictable one.

"Is it really that bad?" he asks her.

"Yes. You're just too far gone to realize it…" She sighs and turns to her right to look out towards the rest of the city, missing the rather annoyed and superior look Riku shoots her way, said look grazing the side of her cheek and flying off harmlessly into the distance. She smiles wryly, says, "Looks like we're going back in time, huh?"

And though Riku hasn't the slightest idea what she's talking about he nods. "Yeah," he tells her, hoping that if he plays along with her for a while, he might be able to actually have something of a life after work this evening.

But nothing seems to deter Olette from the topic at hand—perhaps this is the talk she'd been aiming for back in the office, perhaps not. But it's what's driving her now and Riku can tell by the way she holds her tea cup just tighter than necessary that she means what she says when she says, "_God_, who knows what'll come next. Military, more rules, more censorship, more regulations. More complete… _nonsense_. I'd say 'bullshit', but I'd probably offend you—and it offends me a little, too, I guess, because not taking action to prevent nonsense is one thing, but not taking action to prevent bullshit is completely different. But what I don't _get_ is how you can stand so blindly—so devotedly—beside an organization responsible for things like these. For walls like these."

_Ugh. It comes back to this. Speak of the devil—here she comes with her own __**radical**__ bullshit once more with feeling._

"Look," Riku says, trying to sound authoritative—or if not authoritative, then at least educated, which he can pull off reasonably well, "if the D.R.S. coughed up the money to put the thing up, I'm sure they have good reason to do so."

"What, like they had good reason back when they came to power?" Olette quips.

"There weren't any walls when they came to power, Olette." _Duh_.

But Olette takes on the exact same '_You are a completely uninformed airhead'_ expression that Riku wears now, and both of them blink at the other one in confusion, because both of them can't possibly be completely uninformed airheads at the same moment in time. Olette clears her throat, making her the first to speak, "Uh, hello? Brain fart or something?" she asks him.

"What?" Riku snaps.

"Sixty-six."

He stares very, very blankly at her, and aside from noticing that her haircut is just slightly uneven on the left side of her face by her jawline, he honestly can't jump to any conclusions any time fast.

"Riku, don't be silly," she says.

"I'm not being _silly_. I don't even know what you're talking about."

"The Syndicate's Wall of '66, of course."

Upon mention of the thing—which, Riku would bet his life on, is probably just underground revolutionary propaganda that never took flight—he searches his brain for every ounce of history, every know-what of the island he's ever taken in. He's read countless books, taken countless classes, and yet nowhere in all his mental files upon files can he find any mention of any such stupid wall. So Riku does the proper thing and scoffs and makes a rather annoyed face and asks: "What the hell's _that_?"

"Well what the heck kind of scholar are you that you don't even **remember** it?! _Honestly_, you shouldn't even work for this stupid organization if you don't even know its history."

"I _do_. That's just it. And I _know_ that there aren't any walls or—"

"Barricades?" she supplies.

"—Or _any_ of that crap in it."

The two go into a stare-down of sorts, Riku every bit as angry and defensive as he ever was and will be, and Olette simply taking a firm, strong comfort in the fact that she is right and knows she is right. But oddly enough, Olette is also the first to back down. She studies Riku curiously, then slowly asks him, "You're really serious, aren't you? You don't have a clue what I'm talking about."

"Congratulations. You understand the obvious," he grumbles.

"Riku, this _isn't_ a joke. You really, truly, completely have no idea what it is I'm talking about."

At this, Riku feels he has to laugh rather bitterly—not because he finds the conversation funny, but just because the way Olette is staring at him so searchingly, it leaves him feeling unnerved. He laughs like that, and through laughing and needing to laugh he gets angry and resentful, he says, "So you were fed some fictional shit story as a kid? Guess what? It doesn't mean anything. Whatever they taught you back in that sub-par environment you call an education system—that _crap_ doesn't hold a candle to what the rest of the world might know. Did you ever stop to think of that?"

"Did you ever stop to think that maybe _you're_ the one who's wrong?" Olette asks him.

"Why would_** I**_ be wrong?"

Now, there are a thousand and one things Olette could say to him in response. Almost all of them are angry and many of the angry ones entail her tossing her cup of still-hot tea right in his face and then storming off. But she chooses not to say anything for a moment, and when she does speak again she almost sounds tragically sad. "The Syndicate may have picked the best and the brightest grade-schoolers, Riku," she says, "But they took _charge_ of your education after—"

"I can't believe I'm hearing this."

"You mean you don't find it the slightest bit strange that the… government, as it calls itself, essentially _kidnapped_ you in a nearly literal sense and immersed you in its own perverted education system? They controlled what you knew, Riku! They obviously still—"

Riku is standing up, Olette is losing ground, and she feels herself wanting to overturn tables and throw glassware around when Riku regards her with that belittling kind of a look and says to her, "You're a sick, twisted, and completely irrational insurgent who will probably get herself killed in the next five years and maybe if you weren't always such a raging bitch, I'd really feel bad for you."

"If _you_ weren't such a spineless idiot, I might actually find that threatening."

As luck would have it, no overturning of tables goes down and the café remains as tucked-away and peaceful as it always has been. Around Olette and Riku, the small city continues to run, people passing the little patio where Olette still sits. But in the crowd is a voice, and with the voice—as is usually the case—comes a body, Sora nearly sprinting towards Riku the second he catches sight of that shock of silver beneath the building's awning.

"Riku!"

"…Sora?" Instantly, all trace of anger vanishes from Riku's face and he's left with a rather dopey sort of confusion. With that look, Olette can't even muster up the energy to keep arguing.

Sora comes closer, growing more excited with every step so that by the time he reaches their little table, he looks as thought he's flat out ready to jump out of his shoes with the energy of it all. He's grinning stupidly wide and waving his fist because there's something in it, he says-- "Riku, I have the most--!" And then he actually notices Olette, who noticed him some minutes ago and who is currently looking at him like he's a trick pony on up from the circus and out for a few laughs. Sora stares back, not meaning to be rude, but not noticing the rudeness when he bluntly asks: "Who're you?"

"I'm Olette, I—"

"We were just getting done here, Sora," Riku cuts in. "So, uhh… listen, could it wait a—"

"I went to the wall, Riku! It's **huge**! Bigger than you ever thought! It's _incredible_! And they've got guards all over the place, only they're not very effective because all they really do is stand around and kind of blab, blab, blab in their stupid phones and all that, but I was walking down by the wall and I really—I _really_ wasn't doing _anything_ wrong, I swear, but this guard comes up to me and he—he goes: 'What're YOU doing by the wall?'" Olette can't help but almost choke on her tea at Sora's impression of what a _real man_ must be like—his arms all out, his chest stuck out at a funny angle, and his voice painfully gritty and dark. So Sora laughs too—Riku doesn't—and continues: "And I tell him I'm not doing anything, really, and I'm not! But he goes on _harassing_ me and **harassing** me and I was going to leave and everything because he was just being dumb and obnoxious because I wasn't doing anything wrong, but then this **huge** load of—"

"Bullshit rained down from the sky, yeah, right. Whatever." Riku sighs, turns to Olette, and says, "Look, Olette, I mean it when I say they'll—"

"I found this, Riku." Sora holds out his fist toward him, dropping into Riku's palm the little mud-covered treasure that now gleams a pure, milky white. Riku blinks at it.

"So?" he goes.

"I think it's a bone or something. I found it under the old bridge when I ran away."

Olette, who has decided by this point that Sora is too bubbly and interesting _not_ to like, has gotten to her own feet and taken up her purse, making like she's ready to leave and all the while casually stealing a glance at his supposed 'treasure'. But upon hearing Sora's words, she just smiles brightly at him and informs him: "It's not a bone, silly, it's a guitar pick."

Riku scowls at her and puts the thing back into Sora's hand, completely missing the hurt little look Sora shoots his way. "What, you play guitar now? Are you a closeted hippie or something?" he asks her.

"Look, it's not my fault you're brainwashed and culture-deprived." She can't help but glare at Riku a slight moment longer than necessary, but then she pulls herself back to the present. Aside from wondering what on earth a seemingly sweet, decent boy like Sora has to do with the likes of Riku, she turns to the younger kid with a smile staring to play up on her face again. "Can I see it?" she asks him, holding out one hand.

"Sure."

x x x

"_What is it?"_

"_A token of my affection? Or something." He grins, shrugs, and prods at the sand with a stick. "Whatever you call it," he says, "keep it. I spent all frickin' day making the stupid thing."_

"_Guitar pick, huh?"_

"_**There**__ you go."_

"_It's coral…" There's a slight moment's worth of hesitation, and some feeling creeps up—a little like warmth, a little like laughter—and proceeds to get smothered with enough indifference to snuff out all signs of anything. "Like I'm reeeally gonna pick up the instrument, pansy."_

"_Can't blame me for trying, right?" His face isn't an open book, but it's still obvious he's gone and gotten his feelings stepped on. The only excuse?_

"_Once a brainwashed and culture-deprived sap? __**Always**__ a brainwashed and culture-deprived sap, my man. Lesson learned. And I for one, am hopelessly brainwashed, hopelessly culture-deprived, and—well, hell, I'm probably hopelessly sappy, too. Let's just come out with everything while we're on topic, huh? S-A-P—that-is-me. __**Damn**__, huh? …But why do you always have to open your fat, fucking mouth?"_

"_Does Kairi know?"_

"_Pssht. Yeah right. I mean—get real. She's a baby. She'd squeal and whine over it if she ever found anything out."_

"_Maybe you should give her more credit, man."_

x x x

Olette blinks once, twice, and then finds herself looking into the eyes of Riku, which look just as dark and skeptical as always. She glances left—Sora's eyes just wide-eyed and curious—and wonders what her own face must say—if either of them caught on to what just happened. If Sora himself had felt anything similar.

But Sora doesn't say anything other than: "Neat, huh?"

"It's coral," Olette tells him. She sounds a little dumb saying it, she thinks, but doesn't know what else to say.

"Yep. Reeeally interesting stuff there, man," Riku chimes in. Even Sora picks up on his boredom and gives him the kind of look that begs for both patience and a courageous amount of understanding. So Riku sighs and says to Olette, "We're done for today, right?"

She nods.

"Good. Then we're out."

Sora starts to reach out his hand to take back his treasure, but he looks Olette over, thinks twice on the matter, and pulls his arms back to his side.

"You keep it," he tells her.

And though she feels as though she should probably thank him, she doesn't. Either the words don't come to mind or they lodge themselves halfway through her throat, and by the time she starts mentally berating herself for being a little rude in the face of generosity, Riku and Sora are already crossing the street. So it's Olette and the guitar pick, and for whatever reason, she holds it up to the light just then, just to find that it's thick, solid, and opaque, casting a shadow on her thumb.

x x x

"Riku?"

"Yeah?"

"Do… you know who Radia Corps is?"

They're in the dark of Sora's roof nest, deep into the night, though neither really knows or cares what time it is. Riku chances one glance over at Sora, who is, at this particular moment, flat on his back with his hands stretched up to the ceiling, watching the way his hands move and look in the dark when they appear to be no more than shadows. Riku can't help but laugh a little, and when he does so, Sora turns to stare at him, still questioning. So Riku says, "Well, I might just be shooting in the dark here, but I'm guessing it'd be a corps dispatched from, say, oh, _Radia_. For starters."

"…What does Radia want to do with Destati?"

"Nothing, really. I mean. Back in the day, Radia got all hissy because of the Syndicate coming in here and rebuilding everything back into functionality—making everything work again, making everything create and produce again. Truth is, their economy was probably even worse off than ours was back then and they were bitter that they hadn't moved in first. They were just looking to pick a fight or something. Wars jump-start economies—there's truth in that. But they stopped crying about it all after a while and we haven't heard much from them since."

Sora rolls onto his stomach, his elbows, his knees. He blinks at Riku like he's waiting for him to say or do something brilliant—which, Sora figures, isn't all that much to expect. As if to prompt, he goes: "So are we all friends again?"

Riku just shrugs. "Well, I wouldn't say that," he starts, "but I wouldn't really say we're enemies either, you know? But why all these questions anyway?"

"Nothing. I just… heard people talking today, is all."

"They're probably just paranoid or conspiracy theorists or both."

"…Yeah, you're right."

Some part of Riku wants to have done with it all and just leave it at that. But the part of him that remembers Olette's words and what Olette said about a wall _before_ the wall… He's not entirely sure he can just let it slide. And the whole time he finds himself wavering between one position and another—between support and dissent—he can't help but feel that he's overlooking something terribly important. Sora's head is at rest on Riku's chest and Sora's got his ear to Riku's heart like a pop junkie to a stereo, and Riku begins to wonder if this has anything to do with that terribly important _something_ he's forgetting.

Taking a very literal shot in the dark this time, Riku talks to the room around them, even though he addresses it as: "Sora?" Sora looks up. Riku just keeps looking at nothing in particular. "I… was wondering if you could do me a favor."

"Sure, Riku. What?"

He swallows, bites thoughtfully at the inside of his cheek and wonders if Sora can see that in the dark, in the black of his mouth. He says, "I just want you to steer clear of the wall they put up. Just for a while. I mean. I know there's a reason for it and all, I just don't… _know_ what the wall is made of or anything. It could be dangerous is all."

In the few seconds it takes Sora to come up with an innocent response, Riku's gone and figured out that Sora's already been making plans to return to the wall, to continue on his great, imagined adventure. Of course, Riku's not entirely surprised, but nor is he comforted. _Leave it to Sora to fall a bloody victim to curiosity._

"What, like it looks electric or something? I'll get fried if I approach?" Sora jibes.

"No. Just… I'm going to ask around tomorrow. I just want to know what's the deal behind the wall and all that. It'd just make me feel... _better_… if you contained your budding interest in the stupid thing until then."

"But why?"

"Look, I don't need a reason, okay? Just do what I ask."

"…Alright."

"Thanks."

The silence returns again, but Riku doesn't really find any knowledge in it except for the knowledge that he sounds like a complete and total dick—which isn't really news to him, as he's known that for years now. If Sora's annoyed, which he probably has every right to be, he doesn't really convey it in action or voice. He just lies beside Riku like he's not cold, though both of them are wondering at the same instant if it's possible for two such people to freeze to death simply out of stubbornness and stupidity and refusing to get under the comforter with one another.

Two minutes later, they're under it, and Sora's talking again. It's starting to dawn on Riku like the kid is pretty much resilient like no other.

"You never said it back, you know," Sora goes.

"Said what back?" Riku thinks on this for a bit, and it really doesn't take much longer than that. Rooftop night adventures from some days ago. A spotlight, an awkward moment or two, Sora's confession, and what Riku had meant to be a sort of apologetic hug coming off as a very rigid, unattractive thing. So he's trying to find Sora's eyes right now, but he can't because he can't even find the front of Sora's head in all that hair everywhere and so Riku just sighs—says, "...Sora, we—"

"You can't say anything but the truth, 'cause I can read a lie on your face even in the dark." Sora fixes him to the spot with those eyes, and they might as well really be blue-lights in the dark for all that they catch what little light there is and glow like that.

_Creepy, but at least now I can look at his face._

All jesting aside, Riku is completely dreadful at expressing emotion, and it takes him an embarrassingly long time to come up with anything to say. When he does pull the words from his mouth, it's like pulling teeth, only with ten pounds of sugar and a cupful of cliché to finish it off.

"I missed you in my life. Really," he mumbles.

Sora grins. This is what he was going for—he can't help it. "For how much of it?" he asks Riku.

"What?"

"For how _much_ of your life?"

"For… all of it? I don't know. For… lives before it?" Riku kind of wishes he was dead, dying, or just disintegrating into bits and pieces on the spot. And strange as it is, Sora can tell.

He says, "You always have this really… _bad_ look on your face whenever it comes up. So is it a lie then?"

"…It's not a lie. I just… I'm not used to it. It's weird for me. The only companionship I've had in forever has been in the form of a… canabalistic hamster. And then you come back and it's just… I dunno. Just like it was."

"So you _do_ believe," Sora whispers. It's more a spoken thought or a sigh rather than a whisper, but Riku first identifies the remark as a whisper and nothing more. In fact, he doesn't even register what Sora says right off the bat, instead settling his arms around the smaller boy, who's moved up above Riku, supported on his hands, bangs hanging down and threatening to wreck a little havoc on Riku's nose and cause a sneezing fit if given the chance. By the time Riku's frantic little brain has caught up to relay the message of what Sora _just said_, the boy's kissing him and Riku might as well be comatose because nothing else is possibly going through his brain anymore.

His eyes are wide open and helpless as the kiss takes place, and Riku's partly glad for that because it lets him bear witness to the hopelessly dopy smile on Sora's face, creeping around from around his lips like roots of some weird, fleshy flower. Crazily enough, Riku stifles the sudden urge to giggle moronically—giggle like he hasn't giggled in… well, ever, as far as he can remember—and so he's got this ridiculous expression on his face growing more ridiculous by the second, and because the stifled laughter brings the slightest twitch to Riku's mouth, Sora's eyes flicker open and Sora proceeds to burst into laughter. The laughter pours into Riku's mouth—because, however storybook-like, they still haven't gotten around to parting—and in spite of his courageous efforts, Riku starts laughing hysterically, too.

"And you _do_ care, then?" Sora asks around a mouthful of something like tangible glee.

"Of course, you dingus."

They share more moments like that first one, the humor dying down with each contact made, but Sora's smile stays intact and alive as it was to begin with.

Riku recalls a memory or a thought—a memory of a past thought—that had come about somewhere, sometime, long ago. He had once figured that if he had—if he truly _had_ to ally with the Syndicate, he would convince himself to live under the impression that he was doing so for people like Sora—for Sora himself. For surely, certainly, without a doubt, people like Sora, Riku believes, cannot not exist without protection. And protection he can provide.

The only problem, Riku realizes, long after Sora has fallen asleep half on top of him (snoring a little, in case you were curious)—the _only problem_ is that Riku's not entirely sure what it is that Sora needs protection against.

x x x

The last day of Olette's rigorous interviewing process, she tells him she thinks she should write a book about Kairi. She tells him she thinks they woman's story is brilliant—though Riku definitely catches onto the fact that it's the _story_ that's brilliant and not the woman herself that is. Olette swears then and there in the elevator, she'll make Kairi's tale known if it's the very last thing she does.

All this goes in one ear and out the other, because it's all Riku can process at that moment that he won't have to spend his days in the basement anymore, he won't have to listen to this woman's incesent babble anymore, and he won't have to pretend like he's being productive—instead he can be fully, conscious aware of his own lack of productivity within the comfort of his own uncomfortable office.

Conveniently enough, this is also the same day that the door opposite of Kairi's cell is open—unlocked and ajar just the slightest bit. Riku only notices it after he's been standing around in the hall for maybe twenty minutes, numbly going through the motions of the island's history—which he's been doing since that last slip-up of a coffee date with Olette. There's still no previous wall to be found in all the expanse of Riku's brain, but of course, once he catches sight of the open door, his mind does a clean swipe and all he can concentrate on is the thing right there, right open, right there _waiting_ for him to open it further and see what the hell is inside.

And if some little part of him would ever disagree, it's probably the very same part of him that warned Sora against the wall the night before. And that very same part is promptly hung out to dry right then, because Riku quickly and quietly crosses the hall to where he's never been before, pushes the door aside, and steps right in. If asked, he'd probably be unable to say what on earth has come over him.

The room Riku finds himself in is so completely and utterly different from what he'd been expecting, he actually has to look back behind him to reassure himself that he's still in the office basement. Certain features of the room itself—mainly the jars upon jars of fermented frogs, various limbs, eyes, and fetal pigs—might prevent the ordinary soul from wandering merrily on in, deeper and deeper still. But that's precisely what Riku does, really, not with merriment so much as total fascination. There are beakers and burners, scalpels and syringes, knives and knobs and buttons galore—some of them not even attached to anything, but simply left lying on the floor like relics of a broken down mechanical era.

The further he ventures into the room, the larger it seems to get, far exceeding the size of the little cell on the opposite end of the hall—this lab must be at least ten times the size of that room, and painfully well-lit. Riku's hand comes up to rest on a dead snake coiled in some gel or jelly, left to preserve in a jar like jam. The thing is dull copper in color, and the jar in which it's housed is properly labeled:

"Oxyuranus microlepidotus—the inland taipan. The most venomous snake in all the world, dear boy, dear boy. Venemous, dangerous, lethal and deadly it is. Or was. It is quite tragically very dead. Nice little creatures in real life, though. So sad—so very sad to have such a bad name and such long fangs and so much poison."

Riku's all but stopped breathing at this point because he definitely hadn't been aware of anyone else being in the room when he'd walked in—though now that he thinks about it, that probably should've been expected. Swallowing hard, he turns to his right, around which the voice had come from—and sees…. No one. Blinking, he turns back, looks at the snake—_You're definitely not talking and I'm definitely not insane_—and then proceeds to look left. He can almost sigh with relief when he sees a short, stocky man standing right there, the man who proceeds to blink rather rapidly himself and then adjust his eyeglasses perched on the end of his nose.

Never before has Riku had the curious pleasure of seeing a fellow so strange looking and yet so strangely delightful looking in that strangeness. He almost wants to laugh—the man is like a little hairless bear with glasses and a lab coat and an amazingly awful comb-over that leaves at least fifteen little black hairs standing vertically upright on the top of his skull. And rather than exploding in a fit of rage at Riku's trespassing, the man simply regards him as though Riku were a chair or a vase that he'd gone and misplaced and now, so fortunately, found again in the most unexpected of all places.

"Who're you?" Riku asks him.

"Excuse?" says the man.

"Who are you?" Riku says again.

"Mr. Tigi believes that the more obvious question must be: **who** are **you**? After all, this is Mr. Tigi's workspace. Not Riku's." Tigi moves to the right, to set down the plastic bin he's been carrying on and examination table before removing his glasses to clean them with a handkerchief that has magically appeared in the pocket of his coat.

Riku can't help but grin, and he wishes he could get ahold of himself and stop acting like a child, but he can't help it. Something about this curious little man just reminds Riku of cartoon characters and melted ice cream, and they're things he hasn't thought much about since childhood. So needless to say, he's still beaming like an idiot when he takes his hand away from the snake jar and straightens up a little with pride or vanity or both. "So you know who I am," he says.

"Mr. Tigi knows who everyone is."

"Why are you here? In the basement?"

"This is where Mr. Tigi works. It is his floor, as the thirteenth floor is where you work and therefore it is your floor."

"It's the fourteenth floor actually."

"If you count up from the basement, maybe. But it is the thirteenth from the ground." He's right about this, Riku has to admit, and the superstitious aura of the building's construction has bothered him to no end ever since he started working there—as though a thirteenth floor does not exist because it is simply not called the thirteenth floor. Names change everything.

The man picks up the bin again and as he passes by, Riku can see that it's nearly filled to the brim with tiny metal pellets, each perfectly spherical and each looking exactly like the one beside it. Still caught up in childish glee, Riku follows.

"What is it you do down here, if you don't mind my asking?"

"Important things. Very, very big and important things. World-changing things. Mr. Tigi does what every small boy aspires to do. He changes the course of history."

_I've always wanted to change the course of history._

Tigi puts the bin down on another table and removes his glasses once again, this time blowing hot air on them before rubbing them profusely with his kerchief. Frankly, Riku can't see anything wrong with the glasses, but he doesn't say so. Instead his leans up against the table, palms splayed out, smiling stupidly, inanely, and asking, "Do you know the woman down here? Kairi?"

Tigi stills, but says nothing—he just blinks rapidly and fiddles with a frayed edge of the fabric in hand.

"She's looking for someone named Naminé," Riku tells him. "Do you know where I can find her?"

"Such a troubled childhood." Tigi looks up as though it wasn't he who said the words, though it most certainly was and he grows more flustered in light of it, frantically scrabbling to perch his glasses on his nose once more, pick up the bin again, and walk towards the table he'd just moved from. Perplexed, Riku follows.

"Do you know where I can find Naminé?" he asks.

Tigi removes his glasses once more and Riku almost feels the urge to bat them out of his hand—he's not feeling childish anymore, he's not feeling giddy and alive—he's feeling lost and confused and can't understand the man in front of him or a damn word he's saying. But instead of wiping at his glasses once more, Tigi simply sets them on the table alongside the bin, reaching up and rubbing his eyes with his fists. He turns to look at Riku, presumably, but only looks at Riku's left ear instead.

"Mr. Tigi hears word—he hears they don't use the bridge anymore these days. No, no. Too risky, they say. Too risky now, when people grow big and strong and different, these days. Not so easy to make them listen. Not so easy to make them understand. And the water. Water, water…" He trails of into mumbles and shakes of his fat little head and Riku almost dares to think he's never seen a sadder man before. Instantly, everything is different. Riku forgets whatever astonishment he'd had with Tigi earlier and pleads for attention and understanding—anything at all.

"Listen to me--!"

"He was a good boy—I remember, I remember. Strong-willed and angry, but a good boy, a good boy." He wrings his hands, the kerchief is pulled to its limit and any more force will tear the little thing in two. "Under the bridge, she said… And Mr. Tigi told her—he told her—it could never be true. It could never be true." Tigi's bottom lip starts to quiver, but his eyes stay clear—small and beady and clear—and the quivering only serves to give him a slight stutter when he sys, "G-G-Girls who tell l-l-lies _will catch_ on fire."

"What are you _saying_."

"It is so hard to say."

"Try. …Please."

"'Too hard,' he says, he says."

"What are you doing here?"

"He is… working. Just like you are working."

"Working like I'm working would mean writing. Reading and writing and editing and writing and editing again and writing _again_. That doesn't involve toads and probes and organs and… _Jesus_, whatever you've got in here."

"But you know already what Mr. Tigi is doing. Why do you have to ask? Why do you have to put him through—oh, the sad, sad pain of _telling_ you?"

_I __**know**__ what he's doing? …I do?_ Riku thinks and has to stop and has to think some more because what seems obvious can't possibly be. But he stands there a good thirty seconds thinking as fast and frantic as he can but there _is_ no other option—there is just the obvious and _only_ the obvious.

"The wall," Riku says.

Mr. Tigi nods. He opens and closes his mouth a few times, and then he buries his beefy little hands in the pocket of his lab coat and says, with some degree of a curious sadness about him: "Every time you learned something—say, mathematics—arithmetic—the first thing they taught you how to do was build. How to put it together. How to add. How to create. And after they taught you how to put it together, they taught you how to take it apart, how to take it down. They taught you how to subtract. It is step-by-step, you see, how they teach. The doing and the undoing. The creating and the destroying. Addition and subtraction, multiplication and division. 'Mind is the maker for no reason at all, of all this creation created to fall.'"

"What do you know about the wall?" Riku asks. He doesn't have the skills for such enormous multitasking—he's a fierce one-project focuser and that's that—but he's trying to figure out what this Tigi fellow just said, trying to make sense of it and still trying to ask a coherent string of questions to get him a somewhat coherent answer out of the man.

"I **know**," Tigi says. And for the slightest fraction of a second, he makes eye contact with Riku and all Riku's hopes of the man being completely insane or loopy vanish in a flash. There's too much realization and understanding in that gaze to allow room for lunacy. But the second passes. He returns as he was, nervous eyes flicking from jar to jar, from corner to corner. He says, "Mr. Tigi, he knows too much. Too, too much, you see, to tell you. All too much too soon, you see! Everything is timed and set and now nothing can be done to change what is already in the process of happening."

"_What's_ happening? Tell me what's happening!" Riku's hand slips along the side of the table and he thinks to reach out and touch the man in front of him, to get his attention, to force eye contact, to do something, but the action doesn't come. Partly, this is because Riku can't move his hands, for whatever reason. But partly this is because Riku is deathly afraid of his hand passing through Tigi, of Tigi being nothing more than a creation of his mind—he's too impossibly odd to be real.

"You _know_."

The lab is still for a minute before Tigi opens his mouth, contorted in sorrow and pity. But before he can say anything, there comes a little nudge at the door and both Riku and the scientist turn to stare at Olette, who stares alternately between the two of them in return. If the room's contents disturb her or if she'd known of the room's existence beforehand, Riku can't be sure.

"Riku?" she says. "What are you doing?" 

Tigi clears his throat, throwing his shoulders back and focusing on Riku's chin as he babbles: "And that concludes your lesson in the role of peroxisomes in the response of toad bladder to aldosterone. Mr. Tigi bids you a good afternoon—and to your lady friend, as well."

No sooner are the words out of his mouth does he move to usher Riku out the door, nearly shoving him smack dab onto Olette's still confused little person. Riku means to wheel back around and either punch Tigi or question him further, but he's greeted by a slamming iron door that comes to rest a fraction of an inch from where it would've otherwise pummeled Riku's nose backwards into his skull.

"Olette," he says.

"What? What's wrong?"

The door opposite them now—Kairi's cell—stands open like Riku hasn't seen it before because it _stays_ open and doesn't move to swing shut on the woman inside. His eyes widen, his palms sweat. _"Where's Kairi?"_

"She's gone," Olette says.

"What do you _mean_ she's gone? Where is she?"

"I—I don't know, I—why? What's gotten into you? What, you just wanna talk to her all of a—"

"_Where did she go_? Who took her?" Riku is grabbing her shoulders and shaking her hard, trying to get it through her stubborn head that he needs to know right now, and he thinks Olette gets it because for just a second her eyes are a mirror of his own—worried and confused, only greener and darker. But the second passes and all she _is_ is confused, and so Riku shakes her harder, tries to shake some words out of her.

"Some… I don't know, Riku, some guards or employees or something! They said they were taking her to Naminé." Riku stops shaking her, she pries herself away. She draws up a smile, she thinks she's alleviated Riku's fears. "I've never seen anyone so happy," she tells him. Riku says nothing. Her smile drops away to the place where all smiles must go when they're not in use—some dark little drawer of a person's mental warehouse. She swallows and says, "Anyway, I'm finally done! I'm gonna go check out the wall. Wanna come?"

"Are you _stupid_?!"

She blinks. "Wh--?"

"Don't go anywhere _near_ the fucking wall!"

"But Riku, I—"

"Just do what I tell you already. Do you understand? _Do not. Go near. The wall_."

_Honest to God, if half the world was as smart as it was curious, we'd all be so much better off. Fucking idiots. Messing with things they don't understand—making light of something that isn't light at all, that's as heavy as anything, that's heavy enough to pull us all down into hell and all anyone does is laugh and take pictures and gawk around like it's a wonder or a treasure and it's not, it's none, it's a disaster, a goddamn disaster and no one knows._

Following his outburst, Olette has grown stock still and now regards him with much the same look that a game animal would a dog of the hunt. She says, "I understand," without sounding like she understands much of anything aside from the fear of the moment that Riku might shake her until her head drops off and rolls away.

Perfectly oblivious to how disturbing he's become, Riku makes for the elevator.

"I have to go."

"Riku, stop! Please tell me what's wrong!"

"I have to go, I have to… I have…" and he says something that Olette thinks begins with an 'S', but it fades out to silence.

"Sora—?"

But the door's closed and he's gone. Olette is alone in the basement, staring at her lonely reflection in the metal sliding door, a line of separation cleaving her face and body in two halves.

"Riku…"

Riku is crawling upwards in the elevator, trying to assemble in his head a plan, a course of action to launch himself into, because without such a thing he knows he'll be completely and utterly lost. Reaching his office, he sees that it's grown cloudy outside, that it's getting darker fast and that the spotlight should be up and operating. The light is off, the roof is empty. Riku knows and fears it from the moment he looks out the window. And then, as if to make matters worse, he catches a glimpse of a throng of blackness moving along the road beneath. It's like an ink stain or a painfully deep hole with no bottom in sight, but in the middle of such blackness is a pinprick of red, a shock of color. It's Kairi, and the blackness is no ink, no ditch, but at least twenty men suited from head to toe in darkness, leading her through the streets, leading her north.

"Riku. I've been looking for you." Riku doesn't find himself on the verge of shrieking or jumping or howling in surprise, but his body stills completely and he turns towards the voice. His superior stands in the open doorway, and takes three steps into the room under Riku's stare. The unfortunate way the light from above hits his face, it casts shadows down beneath his brow and his eyes might just as well be hollow, they're so dark and buried inside his skull.

"What's going on? Where are they taking Kairi?" Riku asks him. The man just stares back for a moment and Riku gets the feeling he's done this before. "You _know_," he says, feeling like he's pleading again.

But the man is cocky where Tigi showed remorse. He scoffs, one hand to the air to wave the matter off as obvious, as matter-of-fact. "Of _course_ I know. But now is not the time," he tells Riku. The anxious look on the younger man's face only seems to fuel his glee. Riku doesn't move an inch as he draws closer, close enough to stand beside Riku at the window. "It's getting dark outside," he says with a smile.

"_Where are they taking her_."

"Riku, Riku, Riku… You already _know_. …If you don't, you're not observant, and if you're not observant, this organization has no use for you."

The threat in the statement is clear as day, and even the words before it draw up a fear in Riku he can't quite name. Never before has he felt so completely and utterly responsible and at fault—never before has he stared into the face of a product of his own mind and realized that it was false from the beginning. But now he realizes.

_The unbreakable wall… _

'_Perhaps the only way to break the unbreakable is to find a bond greater than the bond of its parts. Instructors tell their pupils that attraction holds things together, be it of chemical or physical nature. The wall stays together because the attraction of its parts is so great that none can rival it, none can tear it down. So it stands to reason that the only way to drive through such a bond would be to find one stronger, and though it most likely sounds like foolish fancy to the casual reader of these words, the strongest bond is that of one lover and another. Place the wall between them and they will—with a strong enough bond—find a way over it, under it, around it, or through it, by force or by trickery. The only matter then is to use them to the destroyer's advantage, easily done by making an incision along the wrist of one party and along the spine of the other, and within the flesh implanting a series of…—'_

"I-I have to go," he says again, like his life is a record that can't get over a line.

"No, Riku. No. You have to _stay_." The man beside him smiles and taps the glass with one finger. "The wall will be falling soon, with all the suddenness with which it came into existence. You will want to stay away from it for just a short while longer."

Riku says nothing. The man controlling his job is obviously completely deranged and it's now more likely than ever before that what little he's done during his time working for the D.R.S. has been done and monitored under the watchful eye of a man who, by every right, should be locked up, right where Kairi was, in the dark of the world where no one could see him or hear him or be influenced by him. Everything in Riku, every instinct and ounce of knowledge he holds so dear, tells him that he's made the biggest, most irrevocable mistake of his life and now he's in complete danger, and at the mercy of someone probably descended from a madman. He's not aware he's backing away until his superior turns to study him.

He looks at Riku long and hard and if there were any bones and strength in Riku's legs before, they've failed him now because he can't move or walk for fear of falling over the sudden weight of his own body. His superior speaks again, voice dripping with something that's a far cry from pity but is probably just as wicked.

"You don't seem to understand," he says. "The people down there are so foolish, they don't even see a trap until they're already up to their necks in it. You're one of _us_. The one who sets the trap. Not the one who gets caught."

Riku could scream or cry or tear off his very skin in frustration because only now can he see through the wall and the purpose of the wall. Initially to have no purpose at all, but now to serve as a shield between one party and the next.

_No one can see the ocean. No one can see it coming. No one can do anything to prevent it. It's there to make people feel uneasy but protected, and all it's doing is condemning them to death._

The wall is not a means of defense, but a means of distraction, and its usefulness will truly prove itself when it comes crashing to the ground.

"I _have_ to _go_," he says, one final time. And then he takes several steps back, turns to window, and runs straight through it and into the air, glass and skin and bone alike, taking the only leap of faith he has ever taken in his entire life, figuratively or otherwise. It doesn't matter, Riku figures as he falls. If he dies, he'll deserve it. And if he lives, he'll live to fix it.

x x x

Somewhere near the wall, Sora stands, watching birds he's never seen before scatter and swing through the air, talons black, beaks black, feathers catching the light and reflecting none back.

Somewhere near the wall Olette is walking quite warily, quite cautiously, quite at home in the skittish nature of everyone else on the streets. She sees Sora and waves to get his attention, but he doesn't catch the movement because he's too busy looking up.

And somewhere, some short ways away from the Destati harbor, from the wall, a fleet of boats and ships and rafts and crafts all stand at the ready, moving forward at a crawling pace, advancing with the coming twilight. The waters of the harbor can barely be made out from all the watercraft packed around one another, every person in ever boat rigid and tense, their voices toned down to an inaudible roar. But then one little craft jolts and grinds to a halt, and somebody curses and somebody else almost gets knocked clear into the water.

The man who cursed curses again. There's water in the boat, so he curses a third time, then says: "Christ, what was that?"

A young man with a camera—the one who'd almost gone tumbling into the ocean—peers over the side of the boat, reaching out one hand into the water, retrieving the culprit of all the destruction "Coral," he says, holding it out as proof. It had clawed its way through the boat's thin metal bottom before finally snapping under the stress and breaking off, so now it sits dead and white and guilty in the man's hand.

The boat's leader grunts and bats the hand away, muttering darkly: "The _hell_. Goddammit. Well, move out boys. Keep your guns outta water and push on. I don't want any cryin' about wet feet or none of that bull. We don't need the damn boats anymore anyway once we get ashore. You, kid."

The younger man looks up again. "Roxas," he says. He's put the coral in his camera bag, though he doesn't know what prompted him to do it.

"Yeah, whatever. You got your camera ready?"

"Yeah."

"Good. 'Cause this is gonna be something you'll wanna show your grandkids, boy."

Roxas looks on and tries to ignore the seawater pooling in the bottom of the boat. They're close to shore now and he can just make out the gate of the great wall being parted. Through the center of the mass comes a gold glow—the light of the sun already sinking behind the structure of the wall. And if Roxas were to squint, perhaps he could make out the two small, insignificant little silhouettes—two women running and crying and embracing.

Olette and Sora hear the explosion because they are right there, right by the wall, watching when it all occurs. So aside from hearing it, they feel it—it knocks Sora backward, it sends Olette to her knees—and they smell it, too—a chemical odor mixed with something strong and sad and overwhelmingly human. And they're the first to see the first men of the first invasion that Destati's living generations can ever recall. And as the smoke clears, Olette can't help but cry and Sora can't help but stand and stare like the world is coming to an end.

(x) (x) (x)

Chapter title comes from a Sunset Rubdown song! Reference made by Tigi in this chapter was to a Jack Kerouac poem, _Poems of the Buddhas of Old_!

I'm just so stoked to be done with the **beginning** of this ridiculous thing and finally get into my favorite part. So hang tight kids, 'cause we're goin' back in time.

A special thanks to everyone who has left a review so far and who plans on leaving one in the future. As I've said countless times before, this is kind of a completely different little project for me (mostly because it's actually not that little) and any kind of support for it means the world. Thanks again—you're all freakin' awesome.


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